“They should have been with us, Tom, shouldn’t they?  They’d have known what work is;” and I added, for the fun of watching his face:  “I wonder whether we’ll find any gentlemen playing poker downstairs, Tom.”

“God forbid, sar!  God forbid!” he exclaimed, with a look of terror.

The next step was the clearing away of the mounds of fallen masonry and various rubbish, which still lay between us and our fortune—­tedious preliminaries which chafed the boyish heart of the “King.”  To tell the truth, I believe we had both expected to uncover a glittering hoard with the first stroke of the pick.

“‘And metals cry to me to be delivered!’” quoted the “King,” whimsically, fuming as he took his long strides, hither and thither amid the rubbish-heaps, so slow to disappear and reveal those underground passages and hidden vaults, by which the fancies of both of us were obsessed.

We had worked for a week before we made a clearance of the ground floor.  Then at last we came upon a solidly built stone staircase, winding downward.  After clearing away the debris with which it was choked to a depth of some twenty or thirty steps, we came to a stout wooden door studded with nails.

“The dungeon at last,” said the “King.”

“The kitchens, I bet,” said I.

After some battering, the door gave way with a crash, a mouldering breath as of the grave met our nostrils, and a cloud of bats flew in our faces, and set the negroes screaming.  A huge cavernous blackness was before us.  The “King” called for lanterns.

As we raised these above our heads, and peered into the darkness, we both gave a laugh.

“‘Yo—­ho—­ho—­and a bottle of rum,’” sang the “King.”

For all along the walls stood, or lay prone on trestles, a silent company of hogsheads, festooned with cobwebs, like huge black wings.  It was the pirate’s wine cellar!

* * * * *

Such was our discovery for that day, but there is another matter which I must mention—­the fact that, somehow, the news of our excavation seemed to have got down to the settlement.  It is a curious fact, as the “King” observed, that if a man should start to dig for gold in the centre of Sahara, with no possible means of communicating with his fellows, on the third day, there would not fail to be some one to drop in and remark on the fineness of the weather.  So it was with us.  As a general thing, not once in a month did a human being wander into that wilderness where the “King” had made his home.  There was nothing to bring them there, and, as I have made clear, the way was not easy.  Yet we had hardly begun work when one and another idle nigger strolled in from the settlement, and stood grinning his curiosity at our labours.

“I believe it’s them black parrots has told them,” said old Tom, pointing to a bird common in the islands—­something like a small crow with a parrot’s beak.  “They’re very knowing birds.”