ut one half of the opening exposed.

In one great gasp the captain's breath seemed to leave him, but he was a
man of strong nerves, and quickly recovered himself; but even then he did
not lift his lantern so that he could look into the interior of the
mound. For a few moments he shut his eyes. He did not dare even to look.
But then his courage came back, and holding his lantern over the opening,
he gazed down into the mound, and it seemed to his rapid glance that
there was as much gold in it as when he last saw it.

The discovery that the treasure was still there had almost as much effect
upon the captain as if he had found the mound empty. He grew so faint
that he felt he could not maintain his hold upon the top of the mound,
and quickly descended, half sliding, to the bottom. There he sat down,
his lantern by his side. When his strength came back to him,--and he
could not have told any one how long it was before this happened,--the
first thing he did was to feel for his box of matches, and finding them
safe in his waistcoat pocket, he extinguished the lantern. He must not be
discovered, if there should be any one to discover him.

Now the captain began to think as fiercely and rapidly as a man's mind
could be made to work. Some one had been there. Some one had taken away
gold from that mound--how much or how little, it did not matter. Some one
besides himself had had access to the treasure!

His suspicions fell upon Ralph, chiefly because his most earnest desire
at that moment was that Ralph might be the offender. If he could have
believed that he would have been happy. It must have been that the boy
was not willing to go away and leave all that gold, feeling that perhaps
he and his sister might never possess any of it, and that just before
leaving he had made a hurried visit to the mound. But the more the
captain thought of this, the less probable it became. He was almost sure
that Ralph could not have lifted that great mass of stone which formed
the lid covering the opening of the mound, for it had required all his
own strength to do it; and then, if anything of this sort had really
happened, the letters he had received from Edna and the boy must have
been most carefully written with the intention to deceive him.

[Illustration: Holding his lantern over the opening he gazed down into
the mound.]

The letter from Edna, which in tone and style was a close imitation of
his own to her, had been a strictly business