Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/138

 Corder didn't mean that you'd talk really—only by accident. Well, you know now, anyhow, and what we have to do is to keep Longley from suspecting anything. I don't know how much you heard when you were listening; but it's just this, Larry—there's only one way to turn this gold into money and”

“I've tumbled to it, miss,” said Larry. “Sure ould Mike Connelly did the same at Stranrae whin I was a boy. Mike, he robbed a chap of five goulden soverins and dug a hole an' buried thim and then dug them up again, pritindin' they was treasure-trove; but sure wan of thim was an Australian soverin and that give the show away on him.”

“Well, we haven't robbed any one, but that's just about what we want to do—it's our only way. Crab Cay is the place we've fixed on and we're close to it now. We have thought out everything. We have the shovels for digging and the sacks to fill with sand to take the place of the ballast we are landing, not that it will equal its weight, but at all events it will be something toward it. The only bother is Longley and keeping the thing hid from him—at least keeping him from suspecting the truth.”

“Faith, that's so,” said Larry. “Well, Miss Shaila, if you'll give me the time to turn it over in me head I'll maybe be afther thinkin' of somethin'. Longley hasn't the since of a rabbit beyond steerin' and splicin'—all the same, a rabbit would be askin' questions seein' what we're afther and it's for me to put the blinkers on him.”

He left the cabin, took the wheel from Longley and sent him forward on the lookout. Then the others came up.

Invisible and all to west of them lay the Bahamas and the vast flats from which they rise. These banks—and the great Bahama bank has a length of three hundred miles and width of eighty—are the tops of vast mountain ranges rising sheer from incredible depths. Could the waters of the ocean be stripped away you would see the entrance leading to the Straits of Florida like a narrow road winding past sheer cliffs rising miles high to a table-land dotted with hillocks—the Bahama Islands.

Crab Cay is the most eastwardly lying of all these hillocks, the last thing to show of land before Profundity takes charge, making the bed for the Atlantic Ocean to toss in.

Here at Crab Cay, Rum Cay, Caycos, Cat Island and Mariguana, the old blockade runners of the American Civil War used to hide and keep their depots. It was at Crab Cay that Chiselman fought Hayes, Hayes “boarding” the islet where Chiselman and his crowd were making merry, just as though he were boarding a ship. Long years before that Horne was supposed to have hidden a vast quantity of plunder in the sands of Crab Cay, and in the waters to westward of it, protected from the northeast trades and southwest winter gales; some years ago the bones of a ship might have been seen, an old-time ship with the bow all smashed and gone but the poop still standing. This afternoon, however, when Larry on the lookout cried: “There she is,” and the others crowded forward to look, Crab Cay far across the luminous blue of the sea showed nothing of these old-time furious happenings. Nothing but the thready tufted forms of two palm trees, wind bent by the northeast trades, lonely and lost looking.

“Keep her as she goes,” cried Sheila to the helmsman. “It's all thirty-fathom water this side and to the west, and good holding ground.”

Then as they drew nearer she took the wheel herself, giving the order for the anchor to be got ready. It fell in twenty-five fathom water and as the Baltrum swung bow on to the flood Crab Cay in its full extent and desolation lay before them.

Oval in shape, exactly like one of those cuttlefish bones you can pick up on any beach, it lay in the light of the late afternoon sun, the gulls lamenting over it as though it had been a corpse. Of all places in the world—excluding cities—Crab Cay is perhaps the most sinister. Death Valley backed by the Funeral Mountains is horrible, but it is overdone, it shouts. Crab Cay whispers. Whispers and simpers in the sun, the wind stirring the sands and the gulls lamenting on the wind; nowhere higher than six feet above tide mark, it gives you a low horizon bounding a dark-blue desolate sea, and always when the lightest wind is blowing you hear mixed with the sound of the waves on the beach, a voice within a voice, the silky uncertain whisper of the sands.

In the sou'west storms Crab Cay shouts till its voice is heard at Cat Island. It is preferable then.

The two palm trees standing some forty feet apart and bent by the eternal trade