Kastle Krags: A Story of Mystery

The fifteenth word was rod—used as a staff in this case but undoubtedly used as a term of measurement in the script.

From then on my fingers flew through the pages of the Book. “Aned,” the very first word in the column, represented—finding the alphabetical position of each letter—the numbers 1-14-5-4. It was a simple matter to look up the first book of the Bible, Genesis, the fourteenth chapter, the fifth verse, and the fourth word. The verse in this case began:

The fourth word of the verse was fourteenth—and the first word of the finished script.

It was easy to find the other words. I worked them all out in fifteen minutes. “Aqcd,” the third in the column, proved to be the first, seventeenth, third, and fourth letters of the alphabet, respectively, and 1-17-3-4 meant first book, seventeenth chapter, third verse, fourth word, as plain as could be. The word proved to be “on.” Swiftly I went down the list. And at last I had the whole column translated:

Writing it out, I had:

Fourteen rod on wall three rod straight right fastened white rock.

In clearer language, it meant simply and unmistakably, that to find the missing object—unquestionably Jason’s treasure—go fourteen rods out on the natural rock wall, turn straight right into the lagoon for three rods, and there I would find it—fastened to a white rock.

The thing was done. I came to myself to find my fingers toying with the pencil, and my thoughts soaring far away. In spite of the grim record of death already made, the deadly precedent that had been set, in spite of all the dictates of ordinary intelligence, I knew what my future course would be. The lure of gold had hold of me. As soon as the opportunity offered, I was going to follow the thing through to its end, and see with my own eyes that which lay hidden in the depths of the lagoon.

CHAPTER XXII

“It isn’t a question of being afraid. It’s simply a matter of human make-up. To tell the truth, I’m afraid myself—and I’m not ashamed of it. More than once I’ve had to conquer fear in my work. A man who ain’t afraid, one time or another, hasn’t any imagination. Some men are cold as ice, I’ve had deputies that were—and they wouldn’t mind this a bit. I know, Killdare, that you’d come in a pinch. Any man here, I think—any white man—would be down there with me to-night if something vital—some one’s life or something—depended on it. But I don’t want to take any one that it will be hard for, that—that is any one to whom it would be a real ordeal. I’m picking my bunch with some care.”

“Who is going?”

“Weldon, Nopp, you and myself—if you want to come. If not, don’t mind saying so.”

“I want to come!” We smiled at each other, in the hall. After all, no other decision could be made. The high plans I had made for an evening with Edith would have to be given over. In the first place the night might solve the mystery into which I had been drawn. In the second it was the kind of offer that most men, over the earth, find it impossible to refuse. Human beings, as a whole, are not particularly brave. They are still too close to the caves and the witch-doctors of the young world. They are inordinately, incredibly shy, also, and like little children, sometimes, in their dreads and superstitions. Yet through some blessing they have a high-born capacity to conquer the fear that emburdens them.

No white man in the manor house would have refused Slatterly’s offer. Mostly, when men see that they are up against a certain hard deal, some proposition that stirs the deep-buried, inherent instinct that is nothing more or less than a sense of duty—that deep-lying sense of obligation that makes the whole world beautiful and justifiable—they simply stand up and face it. No normal young man likes war. Yet they all go. And of course this work to-night promised excitement—and the love of excitement is a siren that has drawn many a good man to his doom.

“Good,” the sheriff told me simply, not in the least surprised. “What kind of a gun can you scare up?”

“I can get a gun, all right. I’ve got a pistol of my own.”

Nopp came up then, and he and the sheriff exchanged significant glances. And the northern man suddenly turned to me, about to speak.

Until that instant I hadn’t observed the record that the events of the past three nights had written in his face. Nopp had nerves of steel; but the house and its mystery had got to him, just the same. The sunset rays slanted in over the veranda, poured through the big windows, and showed his face in startling detail. The inroads that had been made upon it struck me with a sudden sense of shock.

The man looked older. The lines of his face seemed more deeply graven, the flesh-sacks were swollen under his eyes, he was some way shaken and haggard. Yet you didn’t get the idea of impotence. The hands at his side had a man’s grasp in them. Nopp was still able to handle most of the problems that confronted him.

Slatterly, too, had not escaped unscathed. The danger and his own failure to solve the mystery had killed some of the man’s conceit, and he was more tolerant and sympathetic. There was a peculiar, excited sparkle in his eyes, too.

Slatterly turned to Nopp. “He says he’s got a pistol.”

The second that ensued had an unmistakable quality of drama. Nopp turned to me, exhaling heavily. “Killdare, we’ve beat the devil around the stump all along—and it’s time to stop,” he said. “I don’t like to talk like a crazy man, but we’ve got to look this infernal matter in the face. When you come out to-night come armed with the biggest gun you can find—a high-powered rifle.”

No man argued with another, at a time like this. “I don’t know where I can get a rifle,” I told him.

“Every man in the house has got some kind or another. I’m going to be frank and tell you what I’m carrying—a big .405, the biggest quick-shooting arm I could get hold of. Whatever comes to-night—we’ve got to stop.”

We gathered again at the big mahogany table, dined quietly, and the four of us excused ourselves just before dessert. The twilight was already falling—like gray shadows of wings over land and sea—and we wanted to be at our post. We didn’t desire that the peril of the lagoon should strike in our absence. And we left a more hopeful spirit among the other occupants of the manor house.

They were all glad that armed men would guard the lagoon shore that night. I suppose it gave them some sense of security otherwise not known. The four of us procured our rifles, and walked, a grim company, down to the shore of the lagoon.

“We want to guard as much of the shore line as we can, and still keep each other in sight,” Slatterly said. “And there’s no getting away from it that we want to be in easy rifle range of each other.”

He posted us at fifty-yard intervals along the craggy margin. I was placed near the approach of the rock wall, overlooking a wide stretch of the shore, Weldon’s post was fifty yards above mine, the sheriff’s next, and Nopp’s most distant of all. Then we were left to watch the tides and the night and the stars probing through the darkening mantle of the sky.

We had no definite orders. We were simply to watch, to fire at will in case of an emergency, to guard the occupants of the manor house against any danger that might emerge from the depths of the lagoon. The tide, at the lowest ebb at the hour of our arrival, began soon to flow again. The glassy surface was fretted by the beat and crash of oncoming waves against the rocky barrier. We saw the little rivulets splash through; the water’s edge crept slowly up the craggy shore. The dusk deepened, and soon it was deep night.

We were none too close together. I could barely make out the tall figure of Weldon, standing statuesque on a great, gray crag beside the lagoon. His figure was so dim that it was hard to believe in its reality, the gun at his shoulder was but a fine penciled line, and with the growing darkness, it was hard to make him out at all. Soon it took a certain measure of imagination to conceive of that darker spot in the mist of darkness as the form of a fellow man.

The sense of isolation increased. We heard no sound from each other, but the night itself was full of little, hushed noises. From my camp fire beside Manatee Marsh I had often heard the same sounds, but they were more compelling now, they held the attention with unswerving constancy, and they seemed to penetrate further into the spirit. Also I found it harder to identify them—at least to believe steadfastly the identifications that I made.

We hadn’t heard a beginning of the sounds when we had listened from the verandas. They had been muffled there, dim and hushed, but here they seemed to speak just in your ear. Sea-birds called and shrieked, owls uttered their mournful complaints, brush cracked and rustled as little, eager-eyed furry things crept through. Once I started and the gun leaped upward in my arms as some great sea-fish, likely a tarpon, leaped and splashed just beyond the rock wall.

“What is it, Killdare?” Weldon called. His voice was sharp and urgent.

“Some fish jumped, that was all,” I answered. And again the silence dropped down.

The tide-waves burst with ever-increasing fury. The stars were ever brighter, and their companies ever larger, in the deep, violet spaces of the sky. The hours passed. The lights in the great colonial house behind us winked out, one by one.

There was no consolation in glancing at my watch. It served to make the time pass more slowly. The hour drew to midnight, after a hundred years or so of waiting; the night had passed its apex and had begun its swift descent to dawn. And all at once the thickets rustled and stirred behind me.

No man can be blamed for whipping about, startled in the last, little nerve, in such a moment as this. Some one was hastening down to the shore of the lagoon—some one that walked lightly, yet with eagerness. I could even hear the long, wet grass lashing against her ankles.

“Who is it?” I asked quietly.

“Edith,” some one answered from the gloom.

Many important things in life are forgotten, and small ones kept; and my memory will harbor always the sound of that girlish voice, so clear and full in the darkness. Though she spoke softly her whole self was reflected in the tone. It was sweet, tender, perhaps even a little startled and fearful. In a moment she was at my side.

“What do you mean by coming here alone?” I demanded.

“The phone rang—in the upper corridor,” she told me almost breathlessly. “The negroes were afraid to answer it. I went—and it was a telegram for you. I thought I’d better bring it—it was only two hundred yards, and four men here. You’re not angry, are you?”

No man could be angry at such a time; and she handed me a written copy of the message she had received over the wire. I scratched a match, saw her pretty, sober face in its light and read:

It wasn’t an urgent message. The picture would have reached me, just the same, and I had every intention of watching closely the man I believed was the dead butler’s brother. Yet I was glad enough she had seen fit to bring it to me. We would have our moment together, after all.

What was said beside that craggy, mysterious margin, what words were all but obscured by the sound of the tide-waves breaking against the natural wall of rock, what oaths were given, and what breathless, incredible happiness came upon us as if from the far stars, has little part in the working out of the mystery of Kastle Krags. Certain moments passed, indescribably fleet, and certain age-old miracles were reënacted. Life doesn’t yield many such moments. But then—not many are needed to pay for life.

After a while we told each other good-night, and I scratched a match to look again into her face. Some way, I had expected the miraculous softening of every tender line and the unspeakable luster in her blue eyes that the flaring light revealed. They were merely part of the night and its magic, and the joy I had in the sight was incomparable with any other earthly thing. But what surprised me was a curious look of intentness and determination, almost a zealot’s enthusiasm in her face, that the match-light showed and the darkness concealed again.

She went away, as quietly as she had come. Whether Weldon had seen her I did not know. There was something else I didn’t know, either, and the thought of it was a delight through all the long hours of my watch. Edith Nealman had worlds of common sense. I wondered how she had been able to convince herself that the message was of such importance that she needs must carry it through the darkness of the gardens to me at once.

CHAPTER XXIII

It is an unescapable fact that the whole atmosphere of the Ochakee country is one of death. The moss-draped forests seem without life, the rivers convey no sense of motion, the air is dead, and vegetation rots underfoot. To-night the lagoon was without any image or indication of life. The whole vista seemed like some dead, forgotten wasteland in a dream—a place where living things had never come and was forever incompatible with life.

It was a mysterious hour. The half-crescent moon rose at last, at first a silver tinting of the skyline, a steadily growing wave of light and then the sharply outlined moon itself above the eastern forest. The dark shadows that were my companions took form, strengthened; again I could see their erect figures on the gray crags and the gleam of their rifles in their arms. The perspective widened, the rock wall seemed to extend, stretch ever further across the lagoon, and now the sky was graying in the East.

A moment later I heard Weldon’s voice, ringing full in the hush of the dying night, as he spoke Slatterly’s name. The latter answered at once.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Let’s go in. The night’s over and nothing’s happened. It’s pretty near bright day already.”

It was true that the eastern sky had begun to be tinged with gray. I could see the lines of my hands and the finer mechanisms of the rifle. The hour, however, seemed later than it really was, simply because of the effulgence of the moon. The dread atmosphere of Kastle Krags had in a moment been wholly destroyed. Instead of a place of mystery and peril, it was simply an old-time manor-house fronting the sea, built between the forest and a calm lagoon.

There didn’t seem any use of watching further. If the night was not yet, in fact, completely over, the moon and the graying east gave the effect of morning. Perhaps the fact that the outgoing tide had stilled the lagoon had its effect too. The ominous sound of breaking waves was gone, and it gave a perfect image of quietude and peace.

Slatterly waited an instant before he answered. “Wait a little more,” he said in a resigned tone. “But you’re right—it’s almost morning.”

I don’t think it was five minutes later that I saw Weldon leave his post and saunter over to the sheriff’s side. I suppose, bored with his task, the time seemed much longer to him. True, the lagoon was gray, the shadows of the garden had lost their mystery, and there didn’t seem any use of waiting. Indeed, I don’t think any of us escaped a sense of inner embarrassment—something akin to ignominy and chagrin—that we should be standing beside that quiet water-body, with high-powered rifles in our hands. It made us feel secretly ridiculous.

Nopp called over, cheerily, “Through for the night?”

“Might as well,” Slatterly answered. “It was a fool party anyway.”

Very glad that the watch was over, I left my own post, and we had a cigarette apiece beside the still lagoon. Then we went through the gardens to the house.

“We’ve disrupted the regular schedule, anyway,” Nopp said. “I think we’ve come to the end of our trouble, and nothing more to fear. Man, do you think to-day will clear the thing up?”

“What chance is there to clear up such a mess in one day?” The sheriff spoke moodily.

“Because you’re going to have some real help—not a lot of bungling amateurs. You know who’s coming?”

“Lacone—Van Hope’s detective.”

“Yes. He’s a distinguished man—a real scientist in the study of crime. He may do wonders, even in one day.”

“I only hope he does! I don’t care who clears it up—as long as it’s cleared. Now to get a little sleep.”

Tired out, we went to our rooms. The cool of early morning had swept through the halls, and the first glimmer of dawn was at the windows. How white the moon was in the sky, how mysteriously gray the whole sweep of shore and sea! So tired I dreaded the work of undressing, I sat down a moment before the window that overlooked the lagoon.

The moonlight and the dawn gave the appearance of a mist, a gray mist as is sometimes seen over water when the sky is overcast with heavy clouds. At that moment it was impossible to conceive of anything but grayness. The whole conception that the brain had, the only interpretation that the senses made was of this same, lifeless hue. If an artist had tried to paint the picture that was spread before my window he would have needed but one tube of paint.

It was in some way vaguely startling. It went home to some dark knowledge within a man, and left him fearful and expectant. The shore and the sea were gray, the gardens were swept with grayness, the lagoon itself had lost its many colors and only the same neutral tint remained. The only way that the eye could distinguish shore from sea, and garden from shore, was the gradations of the same hue.

Surely dawn was almost at hand. The moon looked less vivid in the sky. And nothing remained but to find what sleep I could.

But at that instant my senses quickened. I could hardly call it a start—it was just a sudden wakening of mind and body. I wasn’t the least sure.... Perhaps in a moment the old lull, the well-remembered sense of well-being and security would return. It had seemed to me that a swift shadow glided through the grayness at the shore of the lagoon.

The window afforded a remarkably wide glimpse of that particular part of the estate. The rift in the trees permitted a view of scattered segments of the rock wall itself. And it wasn’t to be that I could turn and leave them to the gray of morning. In that mysterious, eerie light I saw the whisking shadow again.

It was not merely some little creeping thing from the forest—some living creature such as stirs about at the first ray of dawn. The shadow was much too large. I would have thought, at the first glance, that it was the shadow of a man. But at that instant the figure emerged into the open, and I knew the truth.

The trim form on the shore of the lagoon was that of Edith Nealman. I could see her outline with entire plainness, dark against the gray. Some errand of stealth had taken her down to the shore of the lagoon the moment that it was left unguarded.

In an instant she disappeared, and in the interval I found out how deeply and inexplicably startled I was. And then I saw her again, walking out on the natural rock bridge, and carrying some heavy object, that dragged on the rocks, in her arms.

I could see her stooped figure, and the shadow of the thing that dragged. And there is no telling under Heaven the thoughts and the terrors that swept through me as to what that dragging thing might be.

But in an instant I saw what it was. It was a rather long, heavy plank, certainly of wood. She was about two hundred feet out on the rock wall by now, and I saw that she was launching the plank to the right of the wall, in the water of the lagoon. Before I could wonder or exclaim she herself had slipped in with it, her arms pale white from the shoulders of her dark bathing suit, wading out and guiding the heavy plank beside her.

No man who had read that mysterious script could doubt what her purpose was. She had gone fourteen rods out on the wall, and then she had turned to the right into the lagoon. Plainly she was searching for Jason’s treasure.

She, too, knew the key. In that same flash of time, I understood the look of intent I had seen on her face earlier that night. She had kept her resolve—even now she was herself trying to sound the mystery of her uncle’s disappearance. I understood her own exultation when I had talked of my many scientific plans, and how I lacked means to carry them out. Even then she had likely been working on the cryptogram. It was wholly possible that either Nealman or herself had encountered a copy of the script in the old house, and they had worked on it together.

But there had been some sort of a guard put over Jason’s treasure! With what right had we been so smugly certain that the old legend was not true—that there was not still some evil, tentacled monster of the deep left to slay and drag to his cavern those that dared to penetrate the lagoon. Even now she was wading further and further from the rock wall. I could see just her head and the top of her shoulders above water, the heavy plank still guided beside her.

Fear is an emotion that speeds like lightning through the avenues of the nerves. In the instant that these thoughts went home—thoughts that would have taken moments to narrate in speech but which whipped through the mind in the twinkling of an eye—I plumbed the utter depths of fear. There can be no other word. The gray expanse seemed the waters of death itself; the whole scene, in the gray of dawn, was eerie, savage, unutterably dreadful. And the girl that had come to be my own life was even now wholly within the power of any monstrous foe that should leave its cavern to attack her.

Why had we been so sure! Why hadn’t we guarded those deadly waters every hour, day and night. Every day teaches that many things that seemed incredible a day ago are true: how had we dared to be so arrogant in regard to the legend of the lagoon. Even when three men, one after another, had disappeared without trace we had refused to change our ancient habits of thought: we had still refused to believe. I knew now the fate of the missing men. They had gone in search of Jason’s chest—and the treasure guard that dwelt in the lagoon had put them to death. And just before my eyes the girl I loved was following the path they made, making the same quest.

And in that breathless, never-to-be-forgotten moment, I heard a resounding splash of water. Against the craggy, opposite shore the water flew far and white as some living thing that had been concealed in the far crags dived toward her through the still waters of the lagoon.

The whole scene had seemingly occupied less than a second. Already, before I could breathe, I was leaping down the corridor towards the stairs. I called once for help—a door behind me opened. Then I was out in the gray dawn, racing toward the lagoon.

There seemed no interlude of time between the instant that I saw that splashing water and that in which I had plunged full into the gray depths myself. In reality there was a space of several seconds—the gray light showed me that the drama of the lagoon had progressed immeasurably further. The girl was fifty or sixty feet from the rock wall now, just her head showing above water, her arms locked tight about the plank and facing her approaching foe. And something that swam swiftly made streaming ripples toward her.

I swam with amazing ease and swiftness. The terror, innate love of life, were all forgotten in the hope that I might reach Edith’s side in time. And now, by the gray light of dawn, I saw that her foe was upon her.

They were struggling with a desperate frenzy, and for an instant the splashing water almost obscured them. The plank had been torn from her grasp, and by some circumstance had been sped hopelessly out of her reach. And now, the water clearing from my eyes, I could determine the identity of her assailant. No matter what further fate the lagoon had in store for her, this foe was human, at least. Terrible and drawn with passion as it was, I saw the face of Major Kenneth Dell, the man who had disappeared the preceding night.

I yelled, trying to give hope. Already I was almost upon them; and Dell had released his hold of the girl. Whatever had been his purpose it had been forgotten in the face of some greater extremity. Their fight was no more with each other: rather they seemed at death grips with some resistless foe that tore at them from beneath the waves.

I saw Dell’s face. An unspeakable terror, that of one who in wickedness goes down to an awful death, was on his face. It was such a terror as men can know but once, for they never live to tell of it, and which blasts the heart of any one that beholds it. No artist, delving into the abnormal, could have portrayed that fear. It was a thing never to forget, but ever to see again in dreams.

Edith was terrified too, but such a terror as Dell knew was impossible for her. The fear of death that curses a godless man is perhaps the most dreadful retributive force in this world or the next, and Dell knew it to the full. No one who had seen his face could doubt but that all the iniquity of a long life had been atoned for, in one little moment, in the scales of justice. But only a measure of it could oppress her. The only fear that her fine young soul could know was that born of the elemental love of life. And with what seemed to be a final effort she raised her head to call a warning to me.

But even if I had heeded it, it would have come too late. I saw the heads of the man and woman in front of me go down as if drawn by quicksand. And there was no escape for me. The death that dwelt in the lagoon had already seized me in its resistless grasp.

But the guard over Jason’s treasure was not merely some monster implanted from the sea, a mortal thing that years could claim or muscular strength oppose. Rather it was a power that had dwelt there since the world’s young days, ever claiming tribute, and which would continue on until the very sea itself was changed. The demon that had hold of me was merely that of rushing waters. They swept me forward and sucked me down with remorseless force.

There was a sink-hole in the floor of the lagoon. No wonder the water that rushed in at high-tide had seemed to go so quietly away. I was being carried down a subterranean outlet, through some water passage under the rock wall, and into the open sea.

CHAPTER XXIV

But while the trap itself was infallible, irresistible to human strength, there might be fighting aplenty in the darkness of the channel and beyond. The time hadn’t come to give up. The slightest fighting chance was worth every ounce of mortal strength. And as the waters seized me I gave the most powerful swimming stroke I knew, a single, mighty wrench of the whole muscular system, in an attempt to get my lips above water for a last breath.

Partly because I have always been a strong swimmer, but mostly by good fortune, I won that instant’s reprieve. I had already exhaled; and in the instant that my lips were above the smooth surface of the lagoon I filled my lungs to their utmost capacity, breathing sharp and deep, with the cool, sweet, morning air. The force of my leap carried me over and down, the descending waters seized me as the sluice in a sink might seize an insect, and slowly, steadily, as if by a giant’s hand, drew me into darkness.

I had been drawn into the subterranean outlet of the lagoon, the passageway of the waters of the outgoing tide. Life itself depended on how long that under-water channel was. I only knew that I was headed under the rock wall and toward the open sea.

At such times the mental mechanics function abnormally, if at all. I was not drowning yet. The thousand thoughts and memories and regrets that haunt the last moments of the lost did not come to me. The whole consciousness was focussed on two points: one of them a resolve to do what I could for Edith, and the other was fear.

Besides the seeming certainty of death, it was unutterably terrible to be swept through this dark, mysterious channel under the sea. Perhaps the terror lay most in the darkness of the passage. It was a darkness simply inconceivable, beyond any that the imagination could conjure up—such absolute absence of light as shadow the unfathomable caverns on the ocean floor or fill the great, empty spaces between one constellation and another. In the darkest night there is always some fine, almost imperceptible degree of light. Here light was a thing forgotten and undreamed of.

The waters did not move with particular swiftness. They flowed rather easily and quietly, like the contents of a great aqueduct. Perhaps it would have been better for the human spirit if they had moved with a rush and a roar, blunting the consciousness with their tumult, and hurling their victim to an instantaneous death. The death in that undersea channel was deliberate and unhurried, and the imagination had free play. Already we three were like departed souls, lost in the still, murky waters of Lethe—drifting, helpless, fearful as children in the darkness. It was such an experience that from sheer, elemental fear—fear that was implanted in the germ-plasm in darkness tragedies in the caves of long ago—may poison and dry up the life-sustaining fluids of the nerves, causing death before the first physical blow is struck.

It was an old fear, this of darkened waters. Perhaps it was remembered from those infinite eons before the living organisms from which we sprang ever emerged from the gray spaces of the sea. And I knew it to the full.

But I didn’t float supinely down that Cimmerian stream. The race was certainly to the swift. Knowing that the only shadow of hope lay in reaching the end of the passage before the air in my lungs was exhausted, I swam down that stream with the fastest stroke I knew. Carried also by the waters, I must have traveled at a really astounding pace, at momentary risk of striking my head against the rock walls of the channel.

An interminable moment later my arms swept about Edith’s form. I felt her long tresses streaming in the flood, but her slender arms had already lost all power to seize and hold me. Had death already claimed her? Yet I could not give her the little store of life-giving air that still sustained me. Holding her in one arm and swimming with every ounce of strength I had, we sped together through that darkened channel.

No swimmer knows the power and speed that is in him until a crisis such as this. No under-water swimmer can dream of what distances he is capable until death, or something more than death, is the stake for which he races. The passage seemed endless. Slowly the breath sped from my lungs. And the darkness was still unbroken when the last of it was gone.

The trial was almost done. I could struggle on a few yards more, until the oxygen-enriched air in my blood had made its long wheel through my body.

What happened thereafter was dim as a dream. There was a certain period of bluntness, almost insensibility; and then of tremendous stress and conflict that seemed interminable. It must have been that even through this phase I fought on, arms and legs thrashing in what was practically an involuntary effort to fight on to the open sea. The last images that drowning men know, that queer, vivid cinema of memories and regrets began to sweep through the disordered brain. There was nothing to do further. The trial was done. I gave one more convulsive wrench....

And that final impulse carried me into a strange, gray place that the senses at first refused to credit. It was hard to believe, at first, that this was not merely the gray borderland of death. Yet in an instant I knew the truth. I was heading toward light: the subterranean blackness of the channel was fading, as the gloom of a tunnel fades as the train rushes into open air. And a second later I shot to the surface of the open sea.

It was through no conscious effort of mine that I did not lose my life in the moment of deliverance from the channel. At such times the body struggles on unguided by the brain; instinct, long forgotten and neglected, comes into its own again. As I came up my lips opened, I took a great, sobbing breath.

I must have submerged again. At least the blue water seemed to linger over my eyes for interminable seconds thereafter. But there were no walls of stone to imprison me now, and I again rose, and this time came up to stay. The life-giving air was already sweeping through me, borne on the corpuscles of the blood.

In an instant I had found my stroke—paddling just enough to keep afloat. Edith still lay insensible in my arms. Only a glance was needed to see where I was. A gray line back of me stretched the rock wall, and beyond it the lagoon. I had been swept from the latter, through a submarine water passage under the wall and a hundred yards into the open sea. Dell, who had gone through the channel ahead of us, was nowhere to be seen.

As soon as I had breath I shouted for help to the little file of men who were already streaming through the gardens toward the lagoon. They must come soon, if at all. Tired out, I couldn’t hold on much longer. In the pauses between my shouts I gazed at the stark-white face of the girl in my arms. My senses were quickening now, and a darkness as unfathomable as that of the undersea passage itself swept over me at the thought that I had lost, after all—that the girl I had carried through was already past resuscitation.

But the men on the shore had heard me now—I was aware of the splash of oars and the hum of the motor of Nealman’s launch. Some one shouted hope—and already the dark outline of the motorboat came sweeping towards me. It was none too soon.... The dead weight in my arms was forcing me down, and my feeble strokes were no longer availing. But now strong arms had hold of me, dragging me and my burden into the boat.

There are no memories whatever of the next hour. I must have lain unconscious on the sand of the shore while Nopp and his men fought the fight for Edith’s life. At least I was there when at last, after lifetimes were done, a strong hand shook my shoulder. Van Hope and Nopp were beside me, and they were smiling.

“A piece of news for you,” Nopp told me, happily. “You put up a good fight—and you’ll be glad to know that your girl will live.”

CHAPTER XXV

After I had read it I showed it to Nopp; and he breathed deeply. But he made but one comment.

“Human nature is a winner, isn’t it, Killdare?” he observed. “Will we ever see the head and tail of it? Now let me see the picture.”

Neither Nopp nor Edith nor any one who looked at it could mistake the likeness presented in the photograph. It was not that of my suspect, Mr. Pescini. One glance established that fact. The well-bred, rather aristocratic face was none other than that of Major Kenneth Dell, he who had got himself invited to Kastle Krags, and who had died in the trap his grandfather had set nearly eighty years before.

Edith and I went over the case together, and we managed to fill up the breaks in each other’s story. We talked it over in the early evening, sitting in a secluded corner of the veranda.

She had already mostly recovered from the experience of the day before. She was still weak and shaken, but seemingly all serious complications had been averted. And she resolutely refused to stay in bed.

“It’s been a tragic thing, all the way through,” she began in the voice I loved. “It’s over now—but Heaven knows it cost enough lives. All for a treasure that no one knows for sure is a reality.

“I’m going over the case simply, Ned—and you tell me if I have it right. The letter shows that both George Florey and David Florey, the butler, were the grandsons of Hendrickson, who once owned this house—who of course was no one but the original Godfrey Jason. Jason too had hated his brother enough to kill him, and as the legend says, it was Jason who first buried the treasure in the lagoon.

“He put it near, perhaps just beside a dangerous sink-hole through which the tidal waters swept under the wall to the open sea. And when he died he left two, and perhaps more, copies of a cryptogram to show where the chest was hidden.

“As you say, Dave Florey, one of the two brothers of this generation of the Jason family, unquestionably got hold of one of the copies. He secured the position of butler at this house on purpose to hunt for and secure the chest. Meanwhile George Florey—we can call him Major Dell, the name he assumed, from now on—got track of the hiding-place of the treasure. The letters show that he had sought for it and traced it from Brazil to Washington, D. C.—at the latter place he possibly consulted old marine records. He evidently had considerable money, and was earning some in questionable ways, and through his acquaintance with Van Hope he got himself invited to this house.

“Here he found his brother. It must have been a disagreeable surprise to him—the fact that you saw him so shaken and seemingly alarmed in the hall would indicate that it was. As the Jason brothers had done before them, these two men hated each other as only brothers can—jealously and terribly. And through some series of events that will never be known, they met that night beside the lagoon.

“George Florey—rather, Major Dell—must have been a thoroughly wicked man. I guess he inherited all of his grandfather Jason’s wickedness—otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to play the part he did. To me it was a dramatic thing—this heritage of wickedness, generation after generation: this blood lust and hatred that was the curse of all his breed. It was Cain and Abel again—the same, old tragic story.

“They met on the lagoon shore, beside the crags, and perhaps Major Dell made an attempt to wrest the copy of the cryptogram from his brother. It’s even possible, but it doesn’t seem likely, that it was the other way ’round. At least, they were working at cross purposes, both of them seemed just about to triumph—and hating each other like two serpents, they came to grips. And here Dell struck a fatal blow—likely with some terrible, hooked instrument that he had brought to grapple for the chest.

“Florey cried out in his death agony and his fear, and Dell was obliged to flee without getting hold of the cryptogram. While the hunt was going on through the gardens, he came back to the body, likely searched the pockets of the victim, and for some reason that can never be exactly known, dragged the body into the lagoon.

“Perhaps he thought the character of the wound would give him away. There’s little doubt that he threw it there with the idea of destroying evidence—at least its presence some way interfered with his plans. And of course before the night was done it had drifted to the sink-hole and through the channel to the open sea.

“Dell likely saw you pick up the script, and that accounts for his presence in your room that night. Meanwhile Nealman and I were working on a copy of it I had found in an old book. The book was the Bible, by the way, and it gave me the first key to the truth. Nealman offered to divide the treasure with me, if he was able to find it. That promise is on paper. It isn’t necessary now, however—and you know why.”

I knew why—well enough. As his niece, Edith inherited all that Grover Nealman left, including this Floridan estate. It was true, however, that his debts just about wiped out all his other possessions.

“As you know, a deal in the stock market practically ruined him,” she went on. “The only way out he could see was the chest that both of us felt was hidden in the lagoon. He never took the monster legend seriously, but always before he had been willing to wait until he could procure some safe appliance to rescue the chest. At that time both of us knew almost exactly where it was. And when the crash came, the sudden need for money and his desperation sent him out in the darkness to procure it. He too was caught in the undersea channel.

“Of course Major Dell was never even menaced by the sink-hole. Likely he had some knowledge of it. He vanished the third night, because first, he realized that Noyes’ testimony would sooner or later convict him of his brother’s murder, and second, because the disappearance of Florey and Nealman had set a good example for him. Some secret business took him into my uncle’s room first, as you guessed. I have no doubt that he was hiding in the dense thickets on the other side of the lagoon all the time—waiting for his chance to procure the treasure and make his escape.

“I don’t know that you’ll believe it, but by this time I had guessed the secret of the lagoon. I didn’t know just how it worked, but I felt there was some kind of an underground outlet that would sweep away any one who tried to wade in the proximity of the treasure. Of course I didn’t suspect Dell—I thought he had merely gone as Uncle Grover had gone, through the sink-hole to his death. When I made my attempt, I went prepared.”

“But how dared you attempt it?” I demanded.

She laughed at my anger. “I wanted to know the truth!” she exclaimed. “I owed it to Uncle Grover—to find out what became of him. I needed the treasure chest, too—for his securities won’t quite balance, he told me, the demands that will be made upon the estate. And finally—maybe there was another reason, too. Perhaps you know what it was.”

The narration could not go on at once. It was one of those moments that a man always remembers, and holds dear when most earthly treasures are as dust. She hadn’t forgotten my own dreams—the plans I had made but which seemed so impossible of fulfillment.

“But how did you dare take the risk?” I demanded.

“There wasn’t any risk—at least, I didn’t think there was. I felt sure that a sink-hole in the bed of the lagoon was the explanation. The plank I dragged out there was plenty big enough to hold me up. You know a floating cake of soap doesn’t go down the sluice as long as the bathtub is any way near full of water. The plank would have held me easily if Dell hadn’t interfered and torn it from my hands.

“Why did he interfere? Of course we can only guess at that. I think he was waiting for a chance to take the treasure himself—and he saw my intention. I suppose he had dreamed about his grandfather’s gold until it was a veritable passion with him—a mania—and he was willing to risk death in the sink-hole sooner than let it go? Likely he meant to tear my hands from the plank but hang on to it himself. Of course it got away from us both. That’s the whole story. Your own wonderful endurance and mastery of swimming saved me. Doesn’t that seem to clear up everything?”

“Almost everything. Yet I don’t see why Dell waited—why he hadn’t got the treasure out some time night before last—or yesterday——”

“Of course he couldn’t work in daylight. Most of the night after his disappearance the lagoon was guarded. Yet it isn’t easy to see why he didn’t make the attempt the night of his disappearance——”

“I suppose he was waiting for a favorable time. He had to have certain equipment, I suppose—to keep from being carried down. Perhaps there are certain periods when the flow through the channel is less, and there isn’t so much suction——”

A sudden light in the girl’s face arrested me and held me. Her eyes were sparkling like blue seas in the sunlight. “‘At F. T.,’” she quoted. “Ned, Ned, what stupids we are! Don’t you see——”

“I can’t say that I do. I saw ‘At F. T.,’ at the bottom of the script, but I don’t know what it meant——”

“‘At flood tide’—that’s what it meant! Just as a sailor would say it. He told on his own directions the way to safety. When the tide flows the water movement is probably in the other direction through the underground channel, and the lagoon is as safe as a lake; and it’s only in the ebb-tide that the suction exists. And of course the ignorant treasure-seeker would make his search in the ebb-tide, when the surface of the lagoon is still.”

Exultant over this, a discovery that, if the treasure was a reality, assured its procurance, neither of us noticed the dignified, courteous approach of Pescini from the hallway. He was distinguished as ever, his dinner-jacket unruffled, his linen gleaming white in the dying light.

“Have you seen Sheriff Slatterly anywhere?” he asked me. “I’m in a sort of quandary—I’ve got a letter on my hands and don’t know what to do with it.”

“A letter?” I repeated. The skin was twitching on my back.

“Yes. I hardly know whether to send it on—or whether he will want it for the investigations. It’s one that Major Dell gave me a few days ago to mail, but which I dropped in my pocket and forgot.”

CHAPTER XXVI

We had guessed right about the underground channel. At flood tide a swimmer could pass directly over it in safety. I located a great limestone boulder that I thought was undoubtedly the “white rock” of the script, but as the surface was rough and choppy from the tidal waves breaking against the rock wall, it was impossible to find the chest by power of vision alone. I found I had to dive again and again, groping with my hands.

But in scarcely a moment my foot encountered an iron chain at the base of the rock. In a moment more the search was ended. A small, iron-bound chest, hardly of twelve inch dimensions, was fastened to the chain, which in turn was hooked securely in a crevice of the boulder.

It was a rather wide-eyed, sober group that rowed back to the shore. In the first place it was almost impossible to believe that such a seeming legendary thing was actually in our hands, a thing of weight and substance and unquestioned reality.

The chest had been made of some sort of very hard wood, chemically treated, and showed not the slightest sign of decay in the eighty years it had lain in the water. How many little crafts had passed over it! What a scarlet trail it had left since the Arganil had borne it from Rio de Janeiro, so long ago. “But naked treasures breed murder!” Nealman had said—speaking truer than he knew.... “They get home to human imagination and human wickedness as nothing else can.”

The boat touched the shore. Nopp lifted the chest easily on the ground. “Don’t be too hopeful,” he advised Edith quietly. “If it’s gold that’s in it, you couldn’t have much over a thousand. It only weighs nine or ten pounds, box and all.”

It was true. And the box itself, bound with iron, could easily weigh that much. Had we been hoaxed by an empty chest?

Somehow or other, nervous and fumbling, we got the thing open. Some of the rods we broke, others we bent back. And at first we only stared in blank surprise.

It did not look like gold—the contents of the chest. Nor was it a string of precious jewels. It seemed merely a bent, shapeless object of some dark-colored metal, and a few dull stones, some of which were as large as hickory nuts, loose in the bottom. Certain words were said as we looked down, certain questions asked—but all of them were dim and lost in a great, wondering preoccupation that dropped over me.

Nopp reached a big hand, took one of the stones, and rubbed it on his trouser leg. Looking at it, he rubbed it again with added vigor. Then he stared at it in sudden, fascinated wonder.

“Good Heavens!” he suddenly exclaimed in tremendous excitement. “Do you know what this is?”

We turned to him, staring blankly. “What is it?” Edith asked. Her voice was quiet; only the bright sparkle in her eyes revealed how excited she really was.

“It’s an emerald. That’s what it is. One of the finest in this country. It’s worth a whole chest of gold. Killdare, the story was that it was a Portuguese ship—bound out from Rio?”

“Yes——”

“And the chest was the property of some noble family, Portuguese princes at the time the court of Portugal was located in Rio de Janeiro?”

“Something like that——”

“The property of a noble family! Edith, it was unquestionably the property of the ruling house itself. Wait just a minute.”

He took the shapeless thing of metal, rubbed it until a little of the tarnish was gone, revealing yellow gold beneath, and slowly bent it in his hands. It took a circular shape. Then he showed us little sockets, set at various points, that had been the settings for the jewels. We saw the truth at once.

“A crown!” Edith said.

“Unquestionably the famous crown that the Portuguese king wore at his Brazilian court—one of the richest courts in history. The jewels came from Brazil, from Peruvian temples—Heaven knows where. And for Heaven’s sake, Edith, send it away and get it changed into securities. It’s death—that’s all it is. It’s the kind of thing that drives men insane.”

We took the yellow thing, and in a wonderful, elated mood, we set it on her own golden curls. But she removed it quickly. We were all instantly sobered as she put it into my hands.

“It’s bad luck to wear it,” she said. “It makes me creep to think what wickedness it has caused—clear through the centuries. I’m an American—and being a queen has never appealed to me.”

Nopp smiled quietly, into the depths of the lagoon. “But you intend to be somebody’s queen, don’t you, Edith?” he asked.

And thus the matter of Kastle Krags came to a new beginning. Edith changed the jewels into securities, just as Nopp advised, and a tenth of them paid the obligations that were left after Nealman’s estate was settled up. The rest provided an annual income that, while it would have been considered moderate by such great financiers as Marten and his fellows, seemed of kingly proportions to me. At least it provided for the maintenance of the old southern manor-house according to its best traditions.

And when Edith and I go sailing away to strange lands beyond the sea, bent on scientific research and adventure, we often wonder what haughty princes and bearded pirates, lurking in the shadows of the deck are saying among themselves. Things have taken a great turn, they whisper together, when the jewels for which they lived and fought, did murder and died, have gone to sustain a rich man’s secretary and a penniless schoolmaster! Perhaps lovely Portuguese princesses watch with contempt; and ear-ringed villains, scornful of such science as mine, swear evil oaths and wonder how the times have tamed!

But perhaps they are glad that their watch of the lagoon is over! There is nothing to hold these restless spirits now, and you can hear them rustling no more in the forest, or feel their tragic presence in the gardens. Some way, the house is more cheerful, and the sea no longer conveys the image of desolation and mystery. When our young friends visit us, to play golf on our links and shoot and fish in the lakes and rivers, they invariably speak of its homely charm and cheer. We have, however, made certain improvements in the grounds.

We have huge, black-lettered signs posted here and there along the lagoon, giving certain advice concerning swimming at ebb-tide.

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters’ errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author’s words and intent.

2. The original of this book did not have a Table of Contents; one has been added for the reader’s convenience.