“An’ where be the diamonds?” asked the old woman.

“Hid in the marsh, safe an’ sound till I takes ’em to St. John’s,” replied the skipper.

“There bain’t no luck in diamonds,” mumbled the old woman, “an’ there bain’t no luck in wracks.  The devil bes in the both o’ them, Denny.”

The skipper passed through his grandmother’s bed-room and entered the cold and un-aired chamber that was reserved for the use of Father McQueen.  He closed the door behind him, bolted it stealthily and then tiptoed across the floor to the bulging chimney and empty fire-place.  He knelt on the drafty hearth, placed the bag of gold beside his knee, and thrust both arms into the black maw of the chimney.  After a minute of prying and pulling he withdrew them, holding a square, smoke-smudged stone in his hands.  Laying this on the hearth, he took up the canvas bag and thrust it into a cavity at the back of the chimney that had been ready for the reception of just such a treasure for some time.  Then he replaced the stone and scrambled to his feet.  He glanced furtively at the one small window which lighted the room, then moved noiselessly to the centre of the floor and put up his right hand to the whitewashed beam that crossed the low ceiling.  His fingers searched delicately for a full minute; and then he lowered his hand, holding a small square of dry wood.  The beam had been skilfully hollowed at this point.  From the cavity he took a small box bound in red leather—­the same small box that he had found among the sheets and blankets of a berth in the wreck.  He opened it and gloated over a necklace of twelve diamonds and fourteen rubies glinting, flashing and glowing on a bed of white satin.  He fondled the wonderful stones with his blunt finger-ends.  So he stood for a long time, breathing heavily, his black eyes glowing like the rubies and glinting like the diamonds.

“A fortune,” he murmured.  “Aye, houses an’ ships, liquor, food an’ sarvants.  Holy saint!  I bes richer nor any marchant in St. John’s!”

At last he closed the box, put it back in the cavity overhead, and returned the small square of wood to its place.  He looked around the room.  The fading light of the winter day was gray at the window.  The curtained bed was a mass of gloom; a white Christ on a cross of ebony gleamed above the narrow chimney-shelf, between two candlesticks of dull brass; the floor, with its few rough mats, was as cold as the frozen snow outside.  The skipper felt the chill of the place in his sturdy bones.  He shot a glance at the crucifix.  It, too, was an offering from the sea.  His father had told him how it had come ashore in the hand of a dead woman, thirty years ago.  Now the carven image of the Saviour seemed to gleam out from the black of the cross and the shadowy wall as if with an inner illumination.  Black Dennis Nolan made the sign with an awkward and unaccustomed finger, and then went swiftly from the room.

The skipper, Bill Brennen and Nick Leary left their cabins stealthily about midnight, met on the snowy barren above the harbor, and tramped southward to the vicinity of Nolan’s Cove.  They worked for a little while in a clump of spruce-tuck, then moved off to another thicket about half a mile away, and there worked again.