Somewhat excited, yet half skeptical, he returned to the excavation and scooped out yet another collection.  This time there could be no mistake.  Nature’s own alchemy had fashioned a veritable ingot.  There were small lumps in the ore which would need alloy at the mint before they could be issued as sovereigns, so free from dross were they.

Iris had gone to Venus’s Bath, and would be absent for some time.  Jenks sat down on a tree-stump.  He held in his hand a small bit of ore worth perhaps twenty pounds sterling.  Slowly the conjectures already pieced together in his mind during early days on the island came back to him.

The skeleton of an Englishman lying there among the bushes near the well; the Golgotha of the poison-filled hollow; the mining tools, both Chinese and European; the plan on the piece of tin—­ah, the piece of tin!  Mechanically the sailor produced it from the breast-pocket of his jersey.  At last the mysterious sign “32/1” revealed its significance.  Measure thirty-two feet from the mouth of the tunnel, dig one foot in depth, and you came upon the mother-lode of this gold-bearing rock.  This, then, was the secret of the cave.

The Chinese knew the richness of the deposit, and exploited its treasures by quarrying from the other side of the hill.  But their crass ignorance of modern science led to their undoing.  The accumulation of liberated carbonic acid gas in the workings killed them in scores.  They probably fought this unseen demon with the tenacity of their race, until the place became accursed and banned of all living things.  Yet had they dug a little ditch, and permitted the invisible terror to flow quietly downwards until its potency was dissipated by sea and air, they might have mined the whole cliff with impunity.

The unfortunate unknown, J.S.—­he of the whitened bones—­might have done this thing too.  But he only possessed the half-knowledge of the working miner, and whilst shunning the plague-stricken quarry, adopted the more laborious method of making an adit to strike the deposit.  He succeeded, to perish miserably in the hour when he saw himself a millionaire.

Was this a portent of the fate about to overtake the latest comers?  Jenks, of course, stood up.  He always, stood square on his feet when the volcano within him fired his blood.

“No, by God!” he almost shouted.  “I will break the spell.  I am sent here by Providence, not to search for gold but to save a woman’s life, and if all the devils of China and Malay are in league against me I will beat them!”

The sound of his own voice startled him.  He had no notion that he was so hysterical.  Promptly his British phlegm throttled the demonstration.  He was rather ashamed of it.

What was all the fuss about?  With a barrow-load of gold he could not buy an instant’s safety for Iris, not to mention himself.  The language difficulty was insuperable.  Were it otherwise, the Dyaks would simply humbug him until he revealed the source of his wealth, and then murder him as an effective safeguard against foreign interference.