CHAPTER VI

A NIGHT IN THE CAVES

When I gasped that breathless question at Uncle Joe about the possibility of the cave having been used by Morgan’s men, there was a sort of stunned silence for a moment. Then Dan and Sydney burst out with a regular war-whoop, in which Reddy--who by now had forgotten he’d believed himself hurt by his fall--joined shrilly.

“_Boys_, for goodness sakes, do stop that awful racket,” I begged. “I want to know what Uncle Joe thinks about it.”

I had to put my hands over my ears for a second or two, till things quieted down, and then I looked up at Uncle Joe and repeated my question.

“It _might_ have been--oh, Uncle Joe, say it would be just exactly the kind of place to find buried treasure. Because, really it _is_!”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said cautiously, “never having buried any. It certainly looks like a pretty good spot to hide anything, from a band of smugglers to pieces of eight. We’ll camp here tonight, anyway, and have a look-see. But there may be a dozen other better hiding places on the Island that we haven’t found yet.”

“Not so nice and convenient to the beach though,” I said firmly, for I couldn’t bear to give up the notion, or even admit a doubt of its probability until we’d at least made a thorough search.

“Why--don’t you see, Uncle Joe, how easily the pirates could have brought the stuff ashore in boats, and carried it these few hundred feet up here to a perfectly safe secret cave like this? Treasure is heavy, you know,--it would be so much easier to bury it as near the landing place as they could. Very likely they stumbled on the cave by chance, just as we did, and then realized it was exactly what they needed.”

“You’d make a great little lawyer,” Uncle Joe laughed. “However, it’s all right with me. You’ve convinced me Sir Henry Morgan’s golden loot is lying somewhere near us at this very moment--that is, until we don’t find it.”

I pouted, but had to grin a little, too. Ever since I can remember I’ve been teased about my enthusiasms. Still, I don’t really mind. Who wants to be a _lettuce_--cool and green and undisturbed by nice things and sorry things both.

But the boys were as excited as I was, this time.

Aunt Mollie, who had taken possession of the flashlight, and was busily exploring the corners of the cave, now gave a little exclamation that brought us all running to her.

“Look what I’ve found!” she cried delightedly. “Another cave--light, too!”

Sure enough, there was a slightly smaller cave opening out of the big one, that was lighted quite brightly by a long narrow aperture up near the roof, which probably looked out into another clump of bushes higher up the cliff.

The floor was as dry and sandy as in the outer cave, and as a room it was certainly more cheerful in there, though perhaps not so mysterious.

“This will make a nice bedroom for you and the girls, Mollie,” Uncle Joe said at once. “Pirates or no pirates, these caves are a great find considered as a camp site. We might even fit them up as a permanent headquarters for outdoor picnics and hiking parties. Let’s go and collect blankets and the rest of the stuff.”

We hurried back to the outer cave and, as the first step in making camp, Uncle Joe, Dan and Sydney began to enlarge the entrance and pile the loose earth removed in doing it inside the cave to form a narrow sloping path from the floor level to the mouth. This certainly made entering and leaving camp easier, especially for Aunt Mollie and Uncle Charles. Then they cut down some of the thickest bushes and underbrush around our new doorway, which let more light into the cave, changing the interior from almost dusk to a cool and pleasant twilight.

We cooked supper on the beach because there wasn’t any proper vent for the smoke inside the caves if we’d lighted a fire in there. But as soon as the meal was over, instead of lingering round the fire and talking, as we usually did, we washed up our few plates, cups and cooking utensils at top speed, so we might hurry back to our latest find.

It was while Syd and I were scrubbing our one and only camp frying pan--both of us working at it together, because Aunt Mollie insisted on its being scrupulously clean and shining--that Syd brought up the subject of the _Myra’s_ return. By a sort of unspoken understanding we hadn’t mentioned it since that morning after the hurricane when we spied that piece of snapped-off mast and the wrecked lifeboat floating beyond the reef. I think we felt, instinctively, that putting our fears into words made them seem that much more real and alarming.

But now, as if the bare possibility of our being suddenly rich had made him think of home, Syd spoke, rather hesitantly.

“Gay, if we don’t find Morgan’s _cache_ before the _Myra_ comes--” he broke off, and I said softly, “_If_ she comes, Syd dear.”

He gulped and tried to turn the sound into a laugh.

“Well, we’ll try to believe she will till we know--she won’t. What do you think Uncle Joe believes, Gay?”

I shook my head and suddenly the lovely twilight sky and the bright reflections on the waters of the lagoon blurred together in a silvery mist of tears across my eyes.

“Of course I haven’t said anything to him, Syd, because we promised each other not to. But I’ve been watching him a lot----”

“So’ve I,” Syd said, in a low voice, huskily.

“And when he doesn’t think anyone’s noticing him,” I went on, more slowly, “he looks so troubled, and--and sort of anxious. And _remorseful_, someway. Do you know, I think he’s blaming himself, inside, all the time, for bringing us down here and letting us in for what we may be up against if the _Myra_ doesn’t--come back. And Syd, if he’s really feeling that--and he is--it’s because he lost hope of the _Myra_ after seeing those pieces of wreckage that morning.”

Syd nodded without speaking. I think I had half expected him to contradict me, and this unprotesting agreement with my words came with a funny sense of shock. It was like finding those floating bits of wreckage all over again and realizing what they might mean to us.

All the delicious excitement of our discovery of the caves faded out in an awful _numbness_ that closed my throat up uncomfortably. My heart began to pound against my ear-drums.

“Oh, Syd,” I said forlornly. “Oh--Syd!”

He put his hand on my arm, and squeezed it hard, which--from Syd--meant more than a whole speech from most people.

“We’d better not talk about it, Sis,” he said, quite decidedly. “I oughtn’t to have started the subject. But I was thinking how--how queer it would be if we really did manage to find old Morgan’s treasure and then couldn’t ever get away to--to spend it.”

The others had gone up to the caves without waiting for us, and looking after them, we could see a cheerful little glow of light stream suddenly out of the black entrance-hole; the lantern, probably, that Uncle Joe had insisted on bringing with us and Dan had carried in addition to his own pack. It certainly would come in usefully now, to make the caves more cheerful that evening.

We packed up the pans and as many of the dishes as Aunt Mollie had left for us, and made our way up the steep hillside to the glow of lantern light. But half way up, something dark, crouching in the bushes, stopped us. Syd went over to investigate and I heard him say, in a startled voice, “Why, it’s Andy--_crying_. Andy, you hurt anywhere? Are you sick?”

He sounded frightened and I ran over to them as fast as my legs would carry me.

Andrée was lying in a huddled little heap, her face down in her arms, and her shoulders shaking in convulsive heaves. Funny, strangled sounds came from her that were more like a hurt baby crying and trying to catch its breath than a big girl of fourteen. It made me feel toward her just as I would have if she’d really been a baby in trouble,--all shaken up inside and sympathetic and anxious to comfort her.

I put both my arms around her and got her head out of the leaves and brambles onto my shoulder, and hugged her close for a few minutes, without trying to say a word. She felt so soft and scared and limp in my arms that I had to put my face down against her wet cheek, and kiss her two or three times, _hard_.

“Andy, what’s the matter?” I asked her after I’d waited a while, and she seemed to be crying more quietly. “Tell Gay, honey. Syd and I’ll do anything--_please_, Andy!”

She wouldn’t say a word at first, though she still held on to me with a desperate sort of hold, but little by little the sobs quieted down and at last she pushed me back from her and sat up, rubbing her eyes with both fists--which again was exactly like a frightened baby.

“Nothing’s the m-matter,” she said, not too steadily. “I’m such a goose about getting scared--you know I do, Gay. That’s all it was. It--it just came suddenly. I was s-scared of the dark and--and those c-caves--” she caught her breath, and I felt a shiver go through her.

“Oh, Andy, you’re not afraid of the caves,” I cried in a dismayed tone. “Why, we’ve been all over them--in every single corner, and there’s not a thing to hurt you.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of _things_ in the caves,” she interrupted me quite scornfully.

“But you said--” I began.

“No, I didn’t,” she insisted. “I only said I got scared easily. I--I like the caves. I’d much rather sleep in there than out on the beach, as we did the other nights. Come on, Mother’ll be waiting for us, Gay. I’ll carry the coffee pot.”

She turned and started up the cliff at a brisk climb, leaving Syd and me to follow, both of us so puzzled by her contradictory words and actions that we hadn’t even a word left to comment on them to each other.

The cave was so enormous that Uncle Joe’s lantern only succeeded in making a round splash of yellow light in the very middle of it, leaving the walls far-off patches of greyish dusk.

But Aunt Mollie and Red had spread all our gay scarlet and tan camping blankets in a circle on the sandy floor around the lantern, as if it were a camp fire, and we sat down, each on our own particular blanket, in our own particular attitude of comfort, ready for the latest of Aunt Mollie’s study hours. She’d had a new one for us at each halt on the entire trip.

That night was the best of all--for me, anyhow. It was supposed to be a history class, but it was the most fascinating way to study history I’d ever tried.

Aunt Mollie called it the “History of the Spanish Main” and it was all about the part of the world we were in right then--the West Indies, the Caribbean Sea, and the coasts of Central and northern South America. She and Uncle Charles told us things they’d read in books and histories, but Uncle Joe’s were the sea stories that sailors hand down to one another in the long, lonely voyages in sailing ships. There were pirates ancient and modern--rum-runners and smugglers of our present day, and the deliberate losing of a ship at sea for the insurance money the owners could collect on her, when she’d stopped being a paying investment as a trader or freighter. I wish you could have heard the scorn Uncle Joe boomed out in his big voice for the captains who let themselves be bribed by owners to commit that lowest-of-all crimes in the sea calendar.

And then, there were stories of the old pirates and buccaneers we’d read about at school in our history books--Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard, and Sir Henry Morgan who was the one we kept the tales going about longest of all; and half a dozen others. They were wicked, cruel men, of course, every last one of them, and we’d have hated terribly to have met them in the flesh on our beautiful Sunset Island, but now we drank in the old sea yarns about them that have come to be sort of legends. Wouldn’t anyone have been thrilled!

There we sat, about our lantern fire, in the very cave, the very circle on the sandy floor where--maybe--once upon a time nearly four hundred years ago Morgan himself and his men had sat before us, and counted pieces of eight, Spanish doubloons and moidores. (I don’t know how much or what nationality a _moidore_ is even now, but I adore the sound of the word!)

And then, much too soon, the evening was over and it was time for our blanket beds.

The boys had brought in soft brush and spread three thick luxurious piles of it in the inner cave for Aunt Mollie, Andy and me. And when we had laid our blankets over them, we couldn’t have envied the richest millionaire at home in the States his most expensive mattress and box springs.

I dropped right off to sleep at once, I was so tired, and I don’t know how long I had slept when I found myself broad awake again, listening to some faint, smothered sort of sound quite near me that was repeated steadily over and over again.

For a while I couldn’t place it, and raised my head on my elbow to listen harder. Then I reached for the flashlight that lay on the floor beside me and turned its light cautiously into the darkness where the sound came from. It was Andy, sobbing into the thick folds of her blanket she’d pulled over her face.

I let the light go out, and reaching over put my arm around her.

“Andy,” I whispered. “Andy, you’ve _got_ to tell me what’s the matter.”

An uneasy little suspicion had occurred to me that she might possibly have overheard Syd’s and my conversation about the _Myra_ down on the beach after supper. If she had, poor kid, it would be natural enough if the knowledge of the uncertainty confronting us had made her cry. But it wasn’t natural for Andy to keep a thing like that to herself, and cry over it in the dark, alone. So I decided it wasn’t that, but I kept getting more and more puzzled as to what could be wrong.

She pulled away from me, shaking her shoulder free of my arm with a little shrug that I knew of old meant “let me alone.”

“Go to sleep, Gay, I’m only--h-h-homesick,” she whispered in a cross voice. But somehow I didn’t mind the crossness as I’d ordinarily have done--being rather quick-tempered myself--because, in spite of its crossness, it was the forlornest and most miserable voice you can imagine.

I deliberately moved my blanket closer, spreading it on the sand of the cave floor, because I was afraid if I moved the brush, too, I’d surely wake Aunt Mollie.

“I’m going to sleep over nearer, where you can grab me in the night if you wake again,” I said cheerfully. And when she didn’t answer I set about scooping some of the sand together in a little mound for a pillow.

There was a small flat pebble in the sand I was sifting through my fingers, and I was about to toss it to one side, so I shouldn’t hurt my cheek against it, when something tiny and round at one end of it moved loosely as I touched it. It felt exactly like the little ring in the top of a watch to snap the chain into.

I twisted about so my back was toward Aunt Mollie, and using my body to screen the light from her, I held the pebble-thing I had in my hand under the light of the electric torch.

It wasn’t a pebble at all, or, if it was, it was a golden pebble that sent back a flicker of sparks at the flashlight.

It was about the size of a United States fifty-cent piece, only a second look showed me it wasn’t round, but heart-shaped, with a gold ring at the top to slip a chain through. Andrée, seeing the light and hearing me give--I suppose I must have--a little grunt of astonishment, turned over quickly, and together we studied the heart-shaped thing in the light of the torch.

“Is it a--a piece of eight, do you suppose?” she asked in an awed voice, but remembering to speak softly because of Aunt Mollie.

“_No!_” I whispered back; my breath was coming in gasps as if I’d been running a race. “Don’t you see--it’s a locket! A gold locket.”

We both bent closer to stare at our surprising treasure-love lying on my shaking, outstretched palm.

“It’s got a name engraved on it,” Andrée murmured, and put out the tip of a finger that was trembling as hard as my own.

I held the locket nearer to the flashlight, and together we made out the name, engraved in flourishing old-fashioned lettering that looked somehow familiar.

It was “Rosemary.”