should be a movable stone there! If this stone should cover a
smaller cavity beneath the great one, what might he not discover within
it? His mind whirled before the ideas which now cast themselves at him,
when suddenly he stood up and set his teeth hard together.

"I will not," he said. "I will not look for a stone with a crack around
it. We have enough already. Why should we run the risk of going crazy by
trying to get more? I will not!" And he replaced the ladder.

"What's the matter in there?" called Shirley, from outside. "Who're you
talking to?"

The captain came out of the opening in the mound, pulled up the ladder
and handed it to Shirley, and then he was about to replace the lid upon
the mound. But what was the use of doing that, he thought. There would be
no sense in closing it. He would leave it open.

"I was talking to myself," he said to Shirley, when he had descended. "It
sounded crack-brained, I expect."

"Yes, it did," answered the other. "And I am glad these are the last bags
we have to tie up and take out. I should not have wondered if the whole
three of us had turned into lunatics. As for me, I have tried hard to
stop thinking about the business, and I have found that the best thing I
could do was to try and consider the stuff in these bags as coal--good,
clean, anthracite coal. Whenever I carried a bag, I said to myself,
'Hurry up, now, with this bag of coal.' A ship-load of coal, you know, is
not worth enough to turn a man's head."

"That was not a bad idea," said the captain. "But now the work is done,
and we will soon get used to thinking of it without being excited about
it. There is absolutely no reason why we should not be as happy and
contented as if we had each made a couple of thousand dollars apiece on a
good voyage."

"That's so," said Shirley, "and I'm going to try to think it."

When the last bag had been put on board, Burke and the captain were
walking about the caves looking here and there to take a final leave of
the place. Whatever the captain considered of value as a memento of the
life they had led here had been put on board.

"Captain," said Burke, "did you take all the gold out of that mound?"

"Every bit of it," was the reply.

"You didn't leave a single lump for manners?"

"No," said the captain. "I thought it better that whoever discovered that
empty mound after us should not know what had been in it. You see, we
will have to circulate these bars of gold pretty ex