From here, ascending, the stream spindled to a thread, and led the eye under the combe of the ridge to a high round boulder, gripped mid-long of its fall by the curled roots of a pine. Under the boulder was the cache of the King’s Desire.
I asked Herman afterward how soon the intimation of what they were to find there began to reach them, and he said, to himself not at all. He remembered Prassade asking of Noche, if this was the trail they had taken with the Ward, and the old man’s quick, sidewise glance that questioned why he asked. He remembered as they came by the green water, one of the keepers stooping to examine something, and Noche beginning to twitch and bristle like a dog striking an unwelcome trail. They came to the boulder. Signs of the recent rains were all about, the half-uprooted pine that braced it showed a slight but fresh abrasion of the bark. The two keepers had their heads together, whispering apart.
They would not believe it! Even when the first scraping of the wooden shovels showed the soil loose and yielding, and below the percolating dampness of the rains they found filling of fresh, dry gravel, they would not believe the cache had been rifled.
The jewels were in a great chest, red and rotten, corded up with skins, half a man’s length under ground. So said Noche, who had buried them. They dug; they were waist deep, they were up to their armpits; they dug steadily.
Suddenly there was a sound of the shovels striking solid. They exclaimed with relief. Noche was old, and in ten years had forgotten. Then the diggers cleared the ground and showed the solid country rock.
Whoever had lifted the Treasure had done it most cleverly. Every particle of the soil removed had been taken out on skins and put back again with filling brought ready for the purpose, so that no sinking of the surface should betray the theft. It had been done recently, between the rains. On the white, abraided bark of the pine there were splatterings of the rapid downpour of the last heavy shower.
Let but a few weeks of stormy weather go over and it would have been impossible to say that the place had been visited.
The Outliers might have gone on guarding an empty cache for generations. They shuddered back from such a possibility like men suddenly upon a brink. They were, in fact, so shocked and astounded by the theft that their faculties were all abroad. They dug wide and furiously, Noche pawing over every crumbling clod with a whimpering sound like a hound at a fox’s earth.