Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/400

388 turbed pieces, then saw a long wriggling thing coil out of the chest and disappear into the green.

Still on the tree hung its stiffened mate, nailed there by MacAllister's knife.

"It even breeds serpents, that gold," whispered Benson, shuddering fearsomely. "It's accursed, I can't touch it, sir."

"Don't be an old woman, Benson. Come, up with it, men!"

They lowered the lid, and swung it by the poles on four pairs of shoulders, with difficulty climbed out of the saucer, and zigzagged on their way through the serried phalanxes of trees, towards the shore.

If it hadn't been for the pocket compass, they never would have made it so quickly. There was need for haste, for as they went, long, far-away, rumbles sounded, leagues below where they were standing, like the echoes of heavy artillery firing in the deep quarries and caverns of the underworld.

Over and over they sounded, gathering force as the Plutonian batteries answered each other, and the whole earth recoiled with each subterranean salvo.

There was a rushing above, whipping the massed treetops like the surface of a lake in a sudden gale, and the trunks danced before the astonished sailors' eyes like the jumbled trees of a drunken man's dreams. Then, following each salvo, fell a death-like silence like the little respites which Nature brings, between the throes, to a woman in travail.

They had dropped the chest, but finally the rumblings ceased altogether. In the absolute silence now holding the forest, they could hear the swish of the surges rushing on shore, and picking up the chest, they hurried on again.