ason out the significance of the three shots I had heard.
They might mean that Captain Riggs had fired on Thirkle, or that Thirkle
had fired on him. In a kind of frenzy at my own helplessness I figured
the various combinations of the three shots as I went along, but all the
time I was in a frantic haste to find the trail.

Finally I found the dry bed of a little stream; but a careful search
showed no signs of any person having been over it, and it seemed to me,
in my upset sense of direction, that it should lead the other way. But,
remembering that I had left the bed of the creek to follow Long Jim and
Petrak, I came to the conclusion that the pirates had abandoned the
creek, or had turned off from it to cache the gold.

I started down it, hoping that it was the one which would lead me to the
captain. My courage was freshened, and, taking a slow trot jumping from
stones to the hard sand, dodging over-hanging branches, and scrambling up
on the banks to avoid creepers, I covered a great deal of ground in a
short time. I kept close watch on the clear spaces for tracks, and
carried my two pistols in the front of my belt, Long Jim's pair well
behind.

I was running and jumping along in this way, as quietly as possible, when
I heard a low, peculiar gruff growl. I stopped in my tracks and listened.
Crawling into the bushes I rested on my knees with a pistol in each hand,
my mouth wide open so as to breathe silently, for I was panting from my
flight.

"Ye didn't look to Bucky for this, did ye?" I heard Buckrow say, so close
at hand that, it startled me. There was no reply to his question, and
after a few minutes I crawled toward him. I found myself in an outcrop of
volcanic rock, and beyond the face of a sheer ledge. The soil was moist
ten feet away from the bed of the stream, and bamboo and the thick,
coarse _colgon_ grass was as high as my shoulder.

Keeping well hidden in the bamboo and grass I crept to a high spot, and
right under the edge of the cliff I saw Thirkle sitting on a sack of
gold, with his hands across his knees, holding a piece of rope and gazing
down at it as if in doubt what to do with it. His bare, bald head was
bowed low.

Buckrow was lying in front of him, with his chin propped in his hands. He
was smoking a cigar and looking at Thirkle. Behind them were piled the
sacks of gold, close to a wide crack in the cliff, a sort of canon, wide
enough for a man to enter, and overgrown at the top with brush an