“Dig for treasure? Florence, you’re still thinking of that barrel of gold!” Greta exclaimed. “You’ll not find it there. It’s on this old ship. You wait and see!”
Greta was glad enough to go. She hoped, for one thing, that she might catch again the tuneful notes of that phantom violin. “Shall I ever know?” she asked herself. “Why does he hide away there on Greenstone Ridge? Percy O’Hara,” she whispered. She closed her eyes to see again that tangled mass of gray hair, those frank, smiling young eyes. “Percy O’Hara. How much good he could be doing! How he can charm the world’s cares away! And how this poor old world needs that these days!
“And he could help those who are struggling up. He could teach—” she dared not continue, dared not hope that sometime, somewhere, this matchless musician might take her bow gently from her hand as he said with that marvelous smile, “No, my child. Not that way. See! Listen!”
“If only it might be!” she sighed. Yes, she wanted to go ashore, longed to climb all the way up Greenstone Ridge. But this last she was resolved never to do. “He said he would come,” she whispered. “He will not fail.”
At ten that night Greta slept soundly beneath the tent on the camping grounds. Having listened in vain for the faintest tremor of music on the air, she had surrendered at last to the call of dreamland.
Florence, too, was beneath the blankets, but she did not sleep. The strange discovery of that day was still on her mind. “Barrel of gold,” she repeated more than once.
Her treasure hunt that afternoon had been singularly unsuccessful. She had not found so much as a flint arrowhead or a copper penny.
“Big piece of nonsense!” she told herself. “And yet—”
A half hour later, having dragged on shoes, knickers, and sweater, she was digging once more on the camping ground, digging for gold. Such are the strange, unfathomable ways of youth.
She had stirred up their campfire and was digging with the aid of its light. As she labored her sturdy figure cast odd, fantastic shadows on the dark forest at her back.