“That’s mair than I can tell.”

“I’ll bury them,” said Swankie, “an’ then it’ll puzzle onybody to tell whaur they are.”

“Ye’ll please yoursell,” said Spink.

Swankie was too angry to make any reply, or to enter into further conversation with his comrade about the kegs of gin, so they continued their way in silence.

Meanwhile, as Lieutenant Lindsay and his men had a night of work before them, the captain suggested that Minnie, Ruby, and himself should be landed within a mile of the town, and left to find their way thither on foot.  This was agreed to; and while the one party walked home by the romantic pathway at the top of the cliffs, the other rowed away to explore the dark recesses of the Forbidden Cave.

CHAPTER XXI

THE BELL ROCK AGAIN—­A DREARY NIGHT IN A STRANGE HABITATION

During that winter Ruby Brand wrought diligently in the workyard at the lighthouse materials, and, by living economically, began to save a small sum of money, which he laid carefully by with a view to his marriage with Minnie Gray.

Being an impulsive man, Ruby would have married Minnie, then and there, without looking too earnestly to the future.  But his mother had advised him to wait till he should have laid by a little for a “rainy day”.  The captain had recommended patience, tobacco, and philosophy, and had enforced his recommendations with sundry apt quotations from dead and living novelists, dramatists, and poets.  Minnie herself, poor girl, felt that she ought not to run counter to the wishes of her best and dearest friends, so she too advised delay for a “little time”; and Ruby was fain to content himself with bewailing his hard lot internally, and knocking Jamie Dove’s bellows, anvils, and sledge-hammers about in a way that induced that son of Vulcan to believe his assistant had gone mad!

As for big Swankie, he hid his ill-gotten gains under the floor of his tumble-down cottage, and went about his evil courses as usual in company with his comrade Davy Spink, who continued to fight and make it up with him as of yore.

It must not be supposed that Ruby forgot the conversation he had overheard in the Gaylet Cove.  He and Minnie and his uncle had frequent discussions in regard to it, but to little purpose; for although Swankie and Spink had discovered old Mr. Brand’s body on the Bell Rock, it did not follow that any jewels or money they had found there were necessarily his.  Still Ruby could not divest his mind of the feeling that there was some connexion between the two, and he was convinced, from what had fallen from Davy Spink about “silver teapots and things”, that Swankie was the man of whose bad deeds he himself had been suspected.

As there seemed no possibility of bringing the matter home to him, however, he resolved to dismiss the whole affair from his mind in the meantime.