her sympathy went with me; and strangely enough, and unjustly, I felt the angrier with Plinny.  But even against Miss Belcher I had a card to play.  “Captain Branscome may be an excellent leader,” I would say; “but I beg you to remember that you gave me no vote in electing him.  I will obey any leader I have my share in choosing, but until then I stand out.”  And I had an inkling that, though the public voice would be against me, I should establish my claim to be taken into any future counsels.

“In for a lamb, in for a sheep,” thought I, and began to back the cockboat towards the corner where the dinghy lay.  As I did so it occurred to me to wonder why the Captain and Mr. Rogers had been so dilatory.  They must have started a full hour ahead of me; they had left the schooner at a brisk stroke, whereas I had merely floated up with the tide.  Yet either I had all but surprised them in the act of stepping ashore, or, if they had landed at once, why had Mr. Rogers loitered on the bank until I was close on overtaking him?

They had landed at the extreme head of the creek.  Therefore (I argued) their intent was to follow up the stream here indicated on the chart and search for the clump of trees which guarded the secret of No. 3 cache.

Sure enough, having beached my boat alongside the dinghy and climbed the green knoll above the foreshore, I spied their footprints on the sandy edge of the stream which here fetched a loop before joining the tidal waters of the creek.  They led me along a flat meadow of exquisitely green turf, fringed with palmetto-trees, to the entrance of a narrow gorge through which the stream came tumbling in a series of cascades, spraying the ferns that overhung it.  The forest with its undergrowth pressed so closely upon either bank that after scrambling up beside the first waterfall I was forced to take off shoes and stockings and work my way up the irregular bed, now wading knee-deep, now clambering or leaping from boulder to boulder; and, even so, to press from time to time through the meeting boughs, shielding my face from scratches.  So, for at least a mile, I climbed as through a narrow green tunnel, and at the end of it found myself wet to the skin.  Five waterfalls I had passed, and, beside the fourth, where the bank was muddy, had noted a long, smooth mark, and recent, such as a man’s foot might make in slipping; so that I felt pretty confident of being on my companions’ track, though I wondered how the Captain, with his lame leg, could sustain such a climb.

But above the fifth waterfall the stream divided into two branches, and at the fork of them I stood for a while in doubt which to choose.  So far as volume of water went, there was, indeed, little or nothing to choose.  If direction counted, the main stream would be that which came rushing down the gorge straight ahead of me—­a gorge which, however, as my eye followed the V of its tree-tops up to the sky-line,