“If you can suggest what to do—anything which hasn’t been done, I shall be only too glad to consider it.”
“You say you dug up the entire Point for a hundred yards inland?” 209
“We did.”
“And dredged the Bay for a hundred yards?”
“Yes.”
She puckered her brows in thought. He regarded her with an amused smile.
“I don’t see what you’re to do, except to do it all over again,” she announced—“Now, don’t laugh! It may sound foolish, but many a thing has been found on a second seeking—and this, surely, is worth a second, or a third, or even many seekings.”
“If there were any assurance of ultimate success, it would pay to spend a lifetime hunting. The two essentials, however, are wanting: the extreme tip of Greenberry Point in 1720, and the beech-trees. We made the best guess at their location. More than that, the zone of exploration embraced every possible extreme of territory—yet, we failed. It will make nothing for success to try again.”
“But it is somewhere!” she reflected.
“Somewhere, in the Bay!—It’s shoal water, for three or four hundred feet around the Point, with a rock bottom. The Point itself has been eaten into by the Bay, down to this rock. Parmenter’s chest disappeared with the land in which it was buried, and no man will find it now, except by accident.”