A pebble hit the water near us, and we looked up to see Rajah wildly waving his arms to us.  He had spied something on the other side of the point.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PURSUIT ASHORE

Seizing our pistols we hurried ashore, and, when Rajah saw us coming, he turned his attention to the beach again and levelled the glass in the direction in which he had found danger.

The ledge was covered with loose fragments of soft volcanic stone, and Riggs and I had to be careful in making the ascent to the top of the ridge, for every time we sought a foothold we threatened to bring down an avalanche of debris, and, not knowing what Rajah had seen, or how close the pirates might be, we were afraid of giving the alarm with a crash of loosened rocks.

I gained the top first, and bracing myself between a couple of boulders, took a careful survey of the beach on the other side before crawling over to Rajah.  The point was an angle in the shore, and the beach ran off sharply to the left, five hundred yards away.

The glare of the sun bothered me at first, and I thought the black boy had given us a scare for nothing, until I detected a movement in the fringe of the jungle close to where the shore line merged with the water of the channel.  I watched it closely for a minute and made out the figure of a man moving cautiously.

Rajah wriggled himself over to me and I took the binoculars; and, when I had put them on the man in the distance, I saw Buckrow walking slowly in our direction with his head bent to the ground, as if searching for some object.  He was so close in the glass that I could see the stripes in his cotton shirt and the buttons down the sides of his navy trousers.

“What is it?” gasped Riggs, breathing hard after his climb, and testing the rocks before he climbed up to where I was perched between two pinnacles of slatey stone.

“Can you see anything, Trenholm?”

“It’s Buckrow.  He’s acting queerly, and I can’t make out just what he is doing.  Take a look and see if you can tell.”

He took the glass and studied the pirate, who was loafing along in an aimless fashion, stopping every few steps to scan the hills of Luzon.

“He’s taking bearings on that mountain-peak or some other beacon,” said the captain.  “He’s got a small compass.”

Without the glass I could see Buckrow get down on his knees in the sand and put something down before him.  Then he stretched at full length, with his hands raised from his elbows to shade his eyes from the sun.

“He’s taking sights on the big peak,” said Riggs.  “It looks to me as if they got a bearing on it from where they have stowed the gold, and Buckrow wants to get the same bearing from the beach and leave a marker as a middle point and a guide to where the treasure is concealed.  The opposite reading of the compass from the bearing of the peak would be a leader to the cache.  The bearing he takes, extended behind him, will run pretty near to where the gold is hidden.  He’s particular as a Swede skipper with that sight he’s taking.”