hape of it startled me so that I did not think any more
of what the passenger was doing, though I saw him raking the sand into
the hole with his hands. I thought the thing was a bad sign, and I did
not like to look at it, though I could not help doing so when the
lightning flashed. I walked along to get out of the way of it, and
passed the place where Wallbridge was at work. When I looked up at the
cliff again, I could not see the coffin any more. There was the
projecting rock, but on this side it did not look at all like a coffin.

"I walked along to the end of the beach, where an angle in the cliff
carried it out into the water. I expected every moment to be carried off
by the sea or to be crushed against the rocks. I did not expect to save
myself, and I could not help feeling that the coffin I had seen was for
me. Just then a flash of lightning showed me a kind of opening in the
cliff, near the angle."

Leopold knew this part of the story by heart, and had often passed up
and down through the ravine, which Harvey Barth described in his diary
with as much precision as though the locality had contained a gold mine.

"A projecting rock shaped like a coffin!" said the reader, as he raised
his eyes from the book to consider what he had read. "I don't remember
any such rock, though there may be such a one there. I must go down to
High Rock in a thunder-storm, and then perhaps it will look to me as it
did to him."

But the nurse was right, after all; there was a solid foundation to the
story she had told, though she had not mentioned any rock shaped like
the head of a coffin. Probably Harvey Barth, who at the time he told the
nurse the story had expected to get well enough to go to his home, had
not intended to describe the locality of the hidden treasure so that she
could find it, but only to assure her that he should have money with
which to reward her, if she took good care of him during his sickness.
Leopold read the account of the burying of the money again; but he could
not recall any rock answering to the description in the book. He had dug
up the sand under every projecting rock that overhung the beach, to the
depth of a foot, without finding the treasure. By the death of every
person on board of the brig except Harvey Barth, the knowledge of the
acts of Wallbridge was necessarily confined to him. If the money had
ever been buried on the beach, Leopold was confident it was there now.
No one could have removed it,