“But, of course,” explained Roddy reassuringly, “you’ll tell them you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“How about your telling me what we are doing?” suggested the engineer.
“From this point,” was Roddy’s only reply, “you crawl on your hands and knees, or some one may see you.”
The engineer bent his tall figure and, following in Roddy’s trail, disappeared into the laurel bushes.
“Why shouldn’t they see me?” he called.
“One looks so silly on his hands and knees,” Roddy suggested.
For ten minutes, except for the rustle of the bushes, they pushed their way in silence, and then Roddy scrambled over the fallen wall of the fort, and pointed down at the entrance to the tunnel.
“The problem is,” he said, “to remove these slabs from that staircase, and leave it in such shape that no one who is foolish enough to climb up here could see that they had been disturbed.”
“Do you really think,” demanded McKildrick, smiling sceptically, “that there is buried treasure under these stones?”
“Yes,” answered Roddy anxiously, “a kind of buried treasure.”