get the boat, laden with the heavy chest, through the surf to any of the other caves—­if the various cracks and fissures I have seen are indeed properly to be called caves—­would be stiff work for three men.  Yes, everything indicates the cavern under the point.  The only question is, isn’t it indicated too clearly?  Would a smooth old scoundrel such as this Captain Sampson must have been have hidden his treasure in the very place certain to be ransacked if the secret ever got out?  Unless it was deeply buried, which it could have been only at certain stages of the tide, even old Heintz would have been apt to come across it in the course of his desultory researches for the riches of the buccaneers.  And I am certain placid old Heintz did not mislead me.  Besides, at Panama, he was making arrangements to go with some other Germans on a small business venture to Samoa, which he would not have been likely to do if he had just unearthed a vast fortune in buried treasure.  Still, I shall explore the cave thoroughly, though with little hope.

Oh, Helen, if I could watch these tropic stars with you to-night!

January 6.  I think I am through with the cave under the point—­the Cavern of the Two Arches, I have named it.  It is a dangerous place to work in alone, and my little skiff has been badly battered several times.  But I peered into every crevice in the walls, and sounded the sands with a drill.  I suppose I would have made a more thorough job of it if I had not been convinced from the first that the chest was not there.  It was not reason that told me so—­I know I may well be attributing too much subtlety of mind to Captain Sampson—­but that strange guiding instinct—­to put it in its lowest terms—­which I know in my heart I must follow if I would succeed.  Shall I ever forget the feeling that stirred me when first I turned the pages of my grandfather’s diary and saw there, in his faded writing, the story of the mate of the Bonny Lass, who died in Havana in my grandfather’s arms?  My grandfather had gone as supercargo in his own ship, and while he did a good stroke of business in Havana—­trust his shrewd Yankee instincts for that—­he managed to combine the service of God with that of Mammon.  Many a poor drunken sailor, taking his fling ashore in the bright, treacherous, plague-ridden city, found in him a friend, as did the mate of the Bonny Lass in his dying hour.  Oh, if my good grandfather had but made sure from the man’s own lips exactly where the treasure lay!  It is enough to make one fancy that the unknown Bill, who paid for too much knowledge with his life, has his own fashion of guarding the hoard.  But I ramble.  I was going to say, that from the moment when I learned from my grandfather’s diary of the existence of the treasure, I have been driven by an impulse more overmastering than anything I have ever experienced in my life.  It was, I believe, what old-fashioned pious folk would call a leading.