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Rh some queer whim of their own, they had not killed him. It would have been very easy. Perhaps they wanted to play on the sailor-superstitions of the crew. Of course she could not guess that the yacht had been taken as hostage, and that she herself had just been kidnapped in reprisal.

All food she refused, and sat reclining against a pile of cut boughs on the outskirts of the camp. Once she let her hand, now free of the thongs, grope underneath the leaves. She felt something hard, and her fingers, feeling along the surface, lighted on a padlock.

The chest!

She had found it again but to what avail now?

Bound around it were iron chains, and through them thrust two three-inch tree butts, by which they had carried it on their shoulders, leaving no furrows after they left the sand. Evidently they had returned after depositing the chest here, and had trampled down bushes and grasses to make the false trail which Ben and the sailor had followed, leading to nowhere.

Suddenly she recalled that other form which she had seen in the dawn, bolstered up against the driftwood log. She sprang up, passed to the other side of the fire, and watched the three precious blackguards eating so ravenously that they reminded her of jackals she had once seen feeding behind the iron bars in a zoölogical garden. Their leader was as cool as ever and quite as fastidious—the more dangerous for that, she thought, and Phil was far more slovenly and gross than in the old debonair days. His face was inflamed, the eyes swollen and heavy-lidded.