Now came the moment which I had been trying not to think about.  I had to find the entrance to the cave, and then go into it or part with my own esteem forever.  I went and peered over the cliff.  I had an unacknowledged hope that the shelf of which Peter had written had been rent off by some cataclysm and that I could not possibly get down to the doorway in the rock.  My hope was vain.  The ledge was there—­not an inviting ledge, nor one on which the unacrobatically inclined would have any impulse to saunter, but a perfectly good ledge, on which I had not the slightest excuse for declining to venture.  Seventy feet below I saw a narrow strip of sand, from which the tide was receding.  It ran along under the great precipice which rose on my right, forming the face of the mountain on the south side.  On that strip of sand the old hiding-place of the-pirates opened.  I thought I saw the overhanging eaves of rock of which the diary had spoken.

There was truly nothing dangerous about the ledge.  It was nearly three feet wide, and had an easy downward trend.  Yet you heard the hungry roar of the surf below, and try as you would not to, caught glimpses of the white swirl of it.  I moved cautiously, keeping close to the face of the cliff.  Crusoe, to my annoyance, sprang down upon the ledge after me.  I had a feeling that he must certainly trip me as I picked my way gingerly along.

An angle in the rock—­a low dark entrance-way—­it was all as Peter had described it.  I peered in—­nothing but impenetrable blackness.  I took a hesitating step.  The passage veered sharply, as the diary had recorded.  Once around the corner, there would be nothing but darkness anywhere.  One would go stumbling on, feeling with feet and hands—­hands cold with the dread of what they might be going to touch.  For, suddenly portentous and overwhelming, there rose before me the unanswered question of what had become of Peter on that last visit to the cave.  Unanswered—­and unanswerable except in one way:  by going in to see.

But if by any strange chance—­where all chances were strange—­he were still there, I did not want to see.  I did not like to contemplate his possible neighborhood.  Indeed, he grew enormously more real to me with every instant I stood there, and whereas I had so far thought principally about the treasure, I now began to think with intensity of Peter.  What ironic stroke of fate had cut him down in the very moment of his triumph?  Had he ever reached the cave to bring away the last of the doubloons?  Were they still waiting there unclaimed?  Had he fallen victim to some extraordinary mischance on the way back to the Island Queen?  Had a storm come up on that last night, and the weakened cable parted, and the Island Queen gone on the rocks, drowning Peter in the cabin with his gold?  Then how had Crusoe got away, Crusoe, who feared the waves so, and would bark at them and then turn tail and run?