This was a severity of toil that I knew must force them to break off presently. Although I could not distinctly recollect the bearings of the treasure as given by Captain Braine, I felt persuaded that he had named the base of the group of trees which the fellows had just quitted as the hiding-place of the money. If it were not there, then I might feel perfectly satisfied it was nowhere else, and hope began to dawn in me afresh. Their labour at the base of the second clump resulted in nothing. They exposed a wide space, and went deep, but to no purpose. The time had passed rapidly; I looked at my watch, and was astonished to find it hard upon five o’clock.
All this while the sky had remained cloudless, and there was no hint visible in any part of its countenance of a change in this softness and tranquillity of weather. The light off-shore draught, however, had shifted into the west, and at this hour there was a cool and pleasant breeze, that brushed the breast of the sea into a surface of twinkling ripples. The water of the lagoon trembled to it as it breathed laterally athwart its face, and already the coral beach of this graceful wide-mouthed inlet bore on the lee-side its stress of tiny breakers.
The sailors by this time were pretty well exhausted. The expressions their faces wore, so far as they might be determinable amid the purple, and perspiration, and hair of their dripping and fire-hot visages, showed them full of irritability and disappointment. The carpenter addressed them; I did not catch what he said, but as they came in a body towards the part of the beach where I had been pacing or sitting whilst they worked, I could hear them swearing and cursing, whilst they grumbled and growled out their surmises as to where the money was hidden, their eyes roving over the soil as they talked. Lush’s face was hard with temper.
‘We’re agoing to send off some men to furl the lighter canvas,’ said he. ‘Ha’n’t got much opinion of this soil as holding-ground, and she’ll drag with that weight of canvas loose, and blow away out of soundings, if we don’t see to it.’
‘A very proper precaution,’ said I coolly. ‘You don’t mean to give up digging yet, I suppose?’
‘Give up?’ he cried with his coarse sarcastic air, and frowning upon me out of the rage my inquiry excited. ‘No; not if we has to dig the whole island up, as I told ye.’
‘Very well. I’ll go aboard with the men in the boat. The money, if it is hidden at all, will be hereabouts,’ said I, with a wave of my arm, ‘and I can be of no further use to you.’
‘No, no; you’ll stop along with us, if you please,’ said the fellow. ‘Your recollection of the number of paces may come back to ye, and we can’t do without you.’
I sent a look from him to the faces of the fellows who stood listening near us, and without another word folded my arms, and with a spin of my heel started off on a walk to and fro.