“Hello!” he exclaimed. “What’s that?–the flag? Say, that’s luck! I’ll break out a bamboo right off. Old staff’s carried clean away.”
“Mr. Blake,–just a moment, please. What have you done with–with it?”
Blake jerked his thumb upward.
“You have carried him up on the cliff?”
“Best place I could think of. No animals–and I piled stones over.... But, I say, look here.”
He drew out a piece of wadded cloth, marked off into little squares by crossing lines of stitches. One of the squares near the edge had been ripped open. Blake thrust in his finger, and worked out an emerald the size of a large pea.
“O-h-h!” cried Miss Leslie, as he held the glittering gem out to her in his rough palm.
He drew it back, and carefully thrust it again into its pocket.
“That’s one,” he said. “There’s another in every square of this innocent, harmless rag–dozens of them. He must have made a clean sweep of the duke’s–or, more like, the duchess’s jewels. Now, if you please, I want you to sew this up tight again, and–”
“I cannot–I cannot touch it!” she cried.