Part 30

"I've never," returned the engineer, "had an accident of that kind."

"Good!" exclaimed Roddy. "Then suppose I said to you, 'McKildrick, I know where there's buried treasure, but I don't know how to get it out.' You would know. Now, if I led you to the buried treasure, would you, as an expert engineer, tell me how to dig it out, and then could you forget you'd given that advice and that you'd ever heard of the treasure?"

For a moment McKildrick considered this hypothetical case. Then he asked: "Which bank are you thinking of opening?"

Roddy rose abruptly.

"I'll show you," he exclaimed.

That Roddy was acting, in spite of secret misgivings, was so evident, that McKildrick good-naturedly demurred.

"Better not tell me anything," he protested, "that you'll be sorry for when you're sober."

Roddy shook his head, and, not until they had left the suburbs and the last fisherman's hut behind them and were on the open coast, did he again refer to the subject of their walk. Then he exclaimed suddenly; "And I forgot to mention that if Father finds out you advised me you will probably lose your job."

McKildrick halted in his tracks.

"It's a pity," he agreed, "that you forgot to mention that. As a rule, when I give expert advice I get a fat check for it."

"And what's more," continued Roddy, "if Alvarez finds it out you'll go to jail."

"Your piquant narrative interests me strangely," said McKildrick. "What else happens to me?"

"But, of course," explained Roddy reassuringly, "you'll tell them you didn't know what you were doing."

"How about your telling me what we are doing?" suggested the engineer.

"From this point," was Roddy's only reply, "you crawl on your hands and knees, or some one may see you."

The engineer bent his tall figure and, following in Roddy's trail, disappeared into the laurel bushes.

"Why shouldn't they see me?" he called.

"One looks so silly on his hands and knees," Roddy suggested.

For ten minutes, except for the rustle of the bushes, they pushed their way in silence, and then Roddy scrambled over the fallen wall of the fort, and pointed down at the entrance to the tunnel.

"The problem is," he said, "to remove these slabs from that staircase, and leave it in such shape that no one who is foolish enough to climb up here could see that they had been disturbed."

"Do you really think," demanded McKildrick, smiling sceptically, "that there is buried treasure under these stones?"

"Yes," answered Roddy anxiously, "a kind of buried treasure."

Cautiously McKildrick raised his head, and, as though to establish his bearings, surveyed the landscape. To the north he saw the city; to the east, a quarter of a mile away, the fortress, separated from the mainland by a stretch of water; and to the south, the wild mesquite bushes and laurel through which they had just come, stretching to the coast.

"Is this a serious proposition?" he asked.

"It's a matter of life and death," Roddy answered.

McKildrick seated himself on the flight of stone steps, and for some time, in silence, studied them critically. He drove the heel of his boot against the cement, and, with his eyes, tested the resistance of the rusty bars of iron.

"With a couple of men and crowbars, and a pinch of dynamite that wouldn't make a noise," he said at last, "I could open that in an hour."

"Could you put it back again?" asked Roddy.