“The canoe! The canoe on the shore,” he told himself. Strange how one’s nervous system responds to outer things that his mind does not recall.
“But of course,” he assured himself as he neared the spot, “the thing won’t give me the shock it once did. We know now that it has been there for two hundred years.
“But wha—”
His gaze covered a space far in advance of him, many yards beyond the spot where the canoe had stood.
“Gone!” he muttered, stopping dead in his tracks. “The canoe is gone!”
Who can say which shock was the greater, the first sudden discovery of the canoe that other time, resting on the beach of this underground lake, or the present astonishing revelation that had come to him?
For a moment he experienced great difficulty in restraining his feet. They appeared ready to carry him back to the entrance. Something within him, an echo of the ancient superstition of his ancestors perhaps, seemed to be insisting that after all this cave was haunted by the spirits of beings who perished long ago and it was they who had ridden away in the mysterious canoe.
For a moment he wavered. Then reason triumphed. “It was Kirk,” he told himself. “He has returned with his giant Carib, and for some reason or another has rowed the canoe to some other part of the lake.
“Only question is, would the thing float after all these years?
“Perhaps,” he thought, “they did not row it away. That giant of his may have put it on his back and carried it outside. What a treasure for some museum of antiquity!”