First we went over our stores, and, thanks to those poor dead mouths
that did not need to be reckoned with any more, we had plenty of
everything to last us for at least a month, not to speak of fishing, at
which Tom was an expert.

When, however, we turned to our plans for the treasure-hunting, we soon
came to a dead stop. No plans seemed feasible in face of that rocky
wilderness, all knives to the feet, and writhing serpents of fanged and
toothed foliage to the eye, with brambles like barbed-wire fences at
every yard.

The indications given by Tobias seemed, in the face of such a terrain,
naive to a degree. Possibly the land had changed since his day. Some
little, of course, it must have done. Tom and I went over Tobias's
directions again and again. Of course, there was the compass carved on
the rock, and the cross. There was something definite--something which,
if it was ever there at all, was there still--for in that climate the
weather leaves things unperished almost as in Egypt.

Sitting on the highest bluff we could find, Tom and I looked around.

"That compass is somewhere among these infernal rocks--if it ever was
carved there at all--that's one thing certain, Tom; but look at the
rocks!"

Over twenty miles of rocks north and south, and from two to six from
east to west. A more hopeless job the mind of man could not conceive.
Tom shook his head, and scratched his greying wool.

"I go most by the ghost, sar," he said. "All these men had never been
killed if the ghost hadn't been somewhere near. It's the ghost I go by.
Mark me, if we find the treasure it'll be by the ghost."

"That's all very well," I laughed. "But how are we going to get the
ghost to show his hand? He's got such bloodthirsty ways with him."

"They always have, sar," said Tom, no doubt with some ancestral shudder
of voodoo worship in his blood. "Yes, sar, they always cry out for
blood. It's all they've got to live on. They drink it like you and me
drink coffee or rum. It's terrible to hear them in the night."

"Why, you don't mean to say you've heard them drinking it, Tom," I
asked. "That's all nonsense."

"They'll drink any kind,--any they can get hold of,--chickens' or pigs'
or cows'; you can hear them any night near the slaughterhouse." And Tom
lowered his voice. "I heard them from the boat, the other night, when I
couldn't sleep--heard them as plain as you can hear a dog lapping water.
And it's my opinion there was two of them. But