Under the stone lay the guardian of the treasure of the Bonny Lass—­And his secret was within my grasp.

I don’t know how long I crouched beside the stone, as drunk with joy as any hasheesh toper with his drug.  I roused at last to find Benjy at my shoulder, thrusting his cool nose against my feverish cheek.  I suppose he didn’t understand my ignoring him so, or thought I scorned him for losing out in his race with the pig.  Yet when I think of what I owe that pig I could swear never to taste pork again.

Brought back to earth and sanity, I rose and began to consider my surroundings.  Somewhere close at hand was the mouth of the cave—­but where?  The cliffs, as I have already said, were too steep for descent.  Nothing but a fly could have crawled down them.  I turned to the craggy face of the mountain.  There, surely, must be the entrance to the cave!  For hours I clambered among the rocks, risking mangled limbs and sunstroke—­and found no cave.  I came back at last, wearily, to the grave.  There lay the dust of the brain that had known all—­and a wild impulse came to me to tear away the earth with my bare hands, to dig deep, deep—­and then with listening ear wait for a whispered word.

I put the delirious fancy from me and moved away to the edge of the cliffs.  Looking down, I saw a narrow sloping shelf which dropped from the brink to a distance of ten or twelve feet below, where it met a slight projection of the rock.  I had seen it before, of course, but it had carried no significance for my mind.  Now I stepped down upon the ledge and followed it to its end in the angle of the rock.

Snugly hidden in the angle was a low doorway leading into blackness.

Now of course I ought in prudence to have gone back to the hut and got matches and a lantern and a rope before I set foot in the darkness of that unknown place.  But what had I to do to-day with prudence—­Fortune had me by the hand!  In I went boldly, Benjy at my heels.  The passage turned sharply, and for a little way we walked in blackness.  Then it veered again, and a faint and far-off light seemed to filter its way to us through a web woven of the very stuff of night.  The floor sloped a little downward.  I felt my way with my feet, and came to a step—­another.  I was going along a descending passage, cut at its steepest into rough, irregular stairs.  With either hand I could touch the walls.  All the while the light grew clearer.  Presently, by another sharp turn, I found myself in a cave, some thirty feet in depth by eighteen across, with an opening on the narrow strip of beach I had seen from the top of the cliffs.