Mr. Tubbs also had sought a shady spot and was fanning himself with his helmet.  From time to time he hummed, in a manner determinedly gay.  However he might disguise it from himself, this time Mr. Tubbs had overshot his mark.  In the first thrill of his great discovery he had thought the game was in his hands.  He had looked for an instant capitulation.

The truth was, since our arrival on the island Mr. Tubbs had felt himself the spoiled child of fortune.  Aunt Jane and Miss Higglesby-Browne were the joint commanders of the expedition, and he commanded them.  The Scotchman’s theoretical rank as leader had involved merely the acceptance of all the responsibility and blame, while authority rested with the petticoat government dominated by the bland and wily Tubbs.

Had Mr. Tubbs but continued bland and wily, had he taken his fair confederates into his counsels, who knows how fat a share of the treasure they might have voted him.  But he had abandoned his safe nook behind the throne, and sought to come out into the open as dictator. Sic semper tyrannis.  So had the mighty fallen.

Faced with the failure of his coup d’etat, Mr. Tubbs’s situation was, to say the least, awkward.  He had risked all, and lost it.  But he maintained an air of jaunty self-confidence, slightly tinged with irony.  It was all very well, he seemed to imply, for us to try to get along without H. H. We would discover the impossibility of it soon enough.

Aunt Jane, drooping, had been led away to the cabin by Miss Higglesby-Browne.  You now heard the voice of Violet in exhortation, mingled with Aunt Jane’s sobs.  I seemed to see that an ear of Mr. Tubbs was cocked attentively in that direction, He had indeed erred in the very wantonness of triumph, for a single glance would have kept Aunt Jane loyal and prodigal of excuses for him in the face of any treachery.  Not even Violet could have clapped the lid on the up-welling fount of sentiment in Aunt Jane’s heart.  Only the cold condemning eye of H. H. himself had congealed that tepid flood.

The morning wore on with ever-increasing heat, and as nothing happened I began to find my watchful waiting dull.  Crusoe, worn out perhaps by some private nocturnal pig-hunt, slept heavily where the drip of the spring over the brim of old Heintz’s kettle cooled the air.  Aunt Jane’s sobs had ceased, and only a low murmur of voices came from the cabin.  I began to consider whether it would not be well to take a walk with Cuthbert Vane and discover the tombstone all over again.  I knew nothing, of course, of Mr. Tubbs’s drastic measures with the celebrated landmark.  As to Cuthbert’s interrupted courtship, I depended on the vast excitement of discovering the cave to distract his mind from it.  For that was the idea, of course—­Cuthbert Vane and I would explore the cave, and then whenever I liked I could prick the bubble of Mr. Tubbs’s ambitions, without relating the whole strange story of the diary and the Island Queen.  I was immensely pleased already by the elimination of Mr. Tubbs from the number of those who need have a finger in the golden pie.  I thought that perhaps with time and patience I might coax events to play still further into my hand.