that had brought such woe to Kastle Krags; and
there was nothing to do but to make an immediate search. When daylight
came again Edith announced that she had fully recovered from the
adventure of two days before, and was ready to help me recover the
chest.

"I can't wait to see if it's really there," she confessed.

We went in flow-tide, and we guided a boat over the place. But we
weren't trusting entirely to our theory that the sink-hole was only
dangerous when the tide was running out. A stout rope was attached to
the prow of the boat, and I lashed it about my waist before I stepped
off into the water.

We had guessed right about the underground channel. At flood tide a
swimmer could pass directly over it in safety. I located a great
limestone boulder that I thought was undoubtedly the "white rock" of the
script, but as the surface was rough and choppy from the tidal waves
breaking against the rock wall, it was impossible to find the chest by
power of vision alone. I found I had to dive again and again, groping
with my hands.

But in scarcely a moment my foot encountered an iron chain at the base
of the rock. In a moment more the search was ended. A small, iron-bound
chest, hardly of twelve inch dimensions, was fastened to the chain,
which in turn was hooked securely in a crevice of the boulder.

It was a rather wide-eyed, sober group that rowed back to the shore. In
the first place it was almost impossible to believe that such a seeming
legendary thing was actually in our hands, a thing of weight and
substance and unquestioned reality.

The chest had been made of some sort of very hard wood, chemically
treated, and showed not the slightest sign of decay in the eighty years
it had lain in the water. How many little crafts had passed over it!
What a scarlet trail it had left since the _Arganil_ had borne it from
Rio de Janeiro, so long ago. "But naked treasures breed murder!" Nealman
had said--speaking truer than he knew.... "They get home to human
imagination and human wickedness as nothing else can."

The boat touched the shore. Nopp lifted the chest easily on the ground.
"Don't be too hopeful," he advised Edith quietly. "If it's gold that's
in it, you couldn't have much over a thousand. It only weighs nine or
ten pounds, box and all."

It was true. And the box itself, bound with iron, could easily weigh
that much. Had we been hoaxed by an empty chest?

Somehow or other, nervous and fumbling, we got the t