looked like that Maggie?"

"Oh, don't I!" exclaimed Ruth, shaking her head.

"What do you suppose _she_ was after--and what is this one over here on
the island for?" pursued Helen, languidly.

Ruth made no reply, but her cheeks flushed and her eyes grew brighter.
She stooped and peered out at the decreasing rainfall. There was a path
leading straight toward the Stone Face. Had this girl whom Jennie had
seen gone in that direction?

The other members of the freshman crew were so inordinately busy
chattering and laughing and telling jokes and stories that nobody for
the moment noticed Ruth Fielding, who stole out from the covert through
the fast slackening rainfall without saying a word. Lightly running over
the crest of the hill, she came in sight of the huge boulder at which
she and Helen had experienced their never-to-be-forgotten adventure the
winter before.

She saw nobody at the foot of the boulder, but she pressed on to the
edge of the grove to make sure. And then she saw that somebody had
certainly and very recently been at work near the boulder.

There was a pickaxe--perhaps the very one she had seen there in the
winter--and a shovel. Some attempt had been made to dig over the
gravelly soil for some yards from the foot of the boulder.

"Goodness me! what can this mean?" thought the girl of the Red Mill.
"Something must be buried here! Treasure hunters! Fancy!" and she
laughed a little uncertainly. "Can somebody believe that this is one of
the hiding places of Captain Kidd's gold? Who ever heard the like?"

The rain ceased falling. There was a tooting of a horn down behind the
island. The launch had come in sight of the shell and Miss Mallory was
trying to signal the girls to return to the shore.

But Ruth did not go back. She heard the girls shout for her, but instead
of complying she went straight across to the Stone Face and picked up
the heavy pickaxe.

"I don't believe whoever has been digging has found anything yet," she
told herself. "No. She's been here before--for, of course, it is that
girl. She couldn't have dug all this over in a few minutes. No. She has
been here and dug unsuccessfully. Then she has come back to-day for
another attempt at--at the treasure, shall we call it? Well!"

There was already an excavation more than a foot in depth and several
yards in circumference. Whatever it was the strange girl had been after
she was not quite sure of its burial place.

In the winter when sh