"If I could have dived myself, or if any of the Indians who were with me could have done so," remarked the professor regretfully, "we need not have wasted a year's time."
"Well," returned Jud, already much excited over the prospect of hidden treasure, "I used to do over forty feet in my twenties, when I was pearl-divin', an' now, though I'm gettin' toward fifty, I certainly ought to be able to get down twenty feet."
"Fifty!" exclaimed Will.
"Fifty!" echoed Joe.
"Fifty!" chimed in Professor Ditson.
"That's what I said," returned Jud, looking defiantly at his grinning friends, "fifty or thereabouts. I'll show you," he went on grimly, stripping off his clothes as they reached the very center of the little lake, and poising his lean, wiry body on the edge of the raft. Suddenly he turned to Professor Ditson. "There ain't nothin' hostile livin' here in this lake, is there?" he questioned.
"I don't think so," returned the professor, reassuringly. "Piranhas are never found at this height, and we saw no traces of any other dangerous fish or reptiles when we were here last year."
"Here goes then, for a fortune!" exclaimed Jud, throwing his hands over his head and leaping high into the air with a beautiful jack-knife dive. His slim body shot down out of sight in the dim, tepid water.
The seconds went by, with no sign of him, until he had been under fully three minutes. Just as they all began to be alarmed for his safety, his gray head suddenly shot two feet out of the water near where he had gone down. Puffing like a porpoise, with a few quick strokes he reached the edge of the raft and tossed on its surface something which clinked as it struck the logs.
There, gleaming in the sunlight, was a bird of solid gold, which looked like a crow, with outspread wings, and which was set thickly with rough emeralds as large as an ordinary marble.