Hastily she ran by Brodie toward the dark end of the cave.  Then she stopped and tried to think; how many paces had King said?  She came back to the fire; thirty, thirty-five?  She began counting as she walked while they watched her wondering and following slowly after her.  She found several boulders in her path; but she had not gone far enough.  She kept on; thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three——­She could hardly see about her.  She stumbled against a rock in her way.

“Try here,” she said.  Already Brodie and Steve Jarrold were at her side.  “This rock.  See if it will move——­”

They thrust her roughly aside.  Brodie set down his rifle, laid his big hands on the boulder, and as if it had weighed only ten pounds, tossed it out of the way.  He knelt, feeling along the ground.  A sudden shout burst from him: 

“Down here!  There’s a big hole; there’s a dark cave underneath.  That’s where it is?”

They brought faggots; at the edge of the hole they hastily built another fire.  They crowded round, peering down.  Brodie tossed a brand through; it dropped a short distance, a few feet only, struck, and began to roll; it caught against a rock, smoked and smouldered, and went out.  Brodie set his legs over the opening, called to the Italian to grab his rifle and keep an eye on Gloria and Gratton, and went down.  The others crowded about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then began piling down after him.  Gloria could see their figures dimly; they went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit.  She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see them.  Suddenly they were silent.  Then there were swift mutterings.  And then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout.  In Gus Ingle’s treasure-cache they had at last come to Gus Ingle’s treasure.  And, among other things, to the skeleton of Gus Ingle himself, sprawling here for sixty years in the dark over a great heap of gold.

Chapter XXIX

Swen Brodie, whose will had at all times directed, was now absolute dictator.  Big and brutal and fearless, drunken with gold, he loomed above his companions, driving them, commanding them, swearing violently that they would do what he told them to do or he’d dash their brains out.

“I led you to it,” he reminded them in a great shouting voice.  “But for me never a man of you would of smelled it.  There’s enough here to make a thousand men rich, and that’s lucky for you!  But we’ve got to hold what we got, and we got to get out of here with it—­somehow.  That somehow is for me to figure out.  And, being as one man’s got to run any job and the rest has got to take orders and take ’em on the jump, you’re doing what I say!  If any man jack of you don’t like that, let him open his head right now!”