Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/336

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HORN they would have whatever they had already landed. As this thought passed through the mind of the captain, he could not help a dismal smile.

"Have!" said he to himself. "It may be that we shall have it as that poor fellow had his bag of gold, when he lay down on his back to die there in the wild desert."

But no one would have imagined that such an idea had come into the captain's mind. He worked as earnestly, and as steadily, as if he had been landing an ordinary cargo at an ordinary dock.

The captain and the men in the boat carried the bags high up on the beach, out of any danger from tide or surf, and laid them in a line along the sand. The captain ordered this because it would be easier to handle them afterwards—if it should ever be necessary to handle them—than if they had been thrown into piles. If they should conclude to bury them, it would be easier and quicker to dig a trench along the line, and tumble them in, than to make the deep holes that would otherwise be necessary.

Until dark that day, and even after dark, they worked, stopping only for necessary eating and drinking. The line of bags upon the shore had grown into a double one, and it became necessary for the men, sometimes the white and sometimes the black, to stoop deeper and deeper into the water of the hold to reach the bags. But they worked on bravely. In the early dawn of the next morning they went to work again. Not a negro had given the ship the slip, nor were there any signs that one of them had thought of such a thing.

Backward and forward through the low surf went 322