“There may be a second,” said Ellery. “If we look through the eye of the needle.”
“Don’t tell me, Queen,” said Inga’s husband with what might have been animation, “you’ve spotted something’.”
“Yes.”
The Hobbes-Watkinses made admiring sounds and Inga embraced her spouse. The explorer seemed stunned.
“Do you mean to say,” demanded Nikki in a loud voice, “that you walk into a strange room and in ten minutes solve a mystery that’s baffled everybody for two hundred and fifty years? Come, come, Mr. Q!”
“It’s still only theory,” said Ellery apologetically. “Inga, may I borrow a broom?”
“A broom!”
Inga, Tony, and the Colonel shouted chaotically down the tower stairs for Long John to fetch the best broom on the premises. Then they ran into the little room and danced around Ellery, reckless of the aged floor.
“If the yarn is true at all,” Ellery said, “Kidd couldn’t have meant it literally when he instructed your ancestor, Mr. Ericsson, to ‘look through the eye of the needle.’ The early treasure-hunters saw that at once, or they wouldn’t have looked for peculiar rock and tree formations. They just didn’t look close enough to home. It was under their noses all the time.”
“What was under their noses all the time?” asked Nikki.
“The marble design on this wallpaper. Marble’s unique characteristic is its veining. Look at these veins in the pattern. Some are long and thin, tapering to a point—”
“Like needles,” said the explorer slowly.
Everyone began scuttling along a wall.
“But where’s one with an opening?” shrieked Inga. “Oh, I can’t find a—a bloody eye!”
“An eye, an eye,” mumbled the Colonel feverishly. “There must be one with an eye!”
“There is,” said Ellery. “Just one, and here it is near this window.”
And while they stared in awe at the place on the wall beyond the tip of Ellery’s forefinger, Long John’s boot and pegleg stumped into the tower room.
“Broom.” He flung it.
Ellery seized it, placed the end of the broom handle on the open space in the needle-shaped vein, said with piety, “Let us pray,” and pushed.
There was a ripping sound and the broom handle burst through the wallpaper and sank into the wall. Ellery kept pushing gently. The handle slid out of sight up to the sweep.
Ellery withdrew the broom and stepped back.
“Mr. Ericsson,” he said, not without emotion, “the honor of the first look is yours.”
“Well, don’t just crouch there, Uncle Eric!” moaned Inga. “What do you see?”
“Can you see anything?”
“But he must—there’s a bright moon!”
“Now, my dears, give the old chap a chance—”
“I see,” said Eric Ericsson slowly, “a bit of the northeast shoreline. You know the place, Inga. It’s that postage-stamp patch of beach with the slight overhang of flat rock. Where you’ve sunbathed.”
“Let me see!”
“Let me!”
“It is!”
“It can’t be. By George, not really—”
“What luck!”
There was a great deal of confusion.
Ellery said rapidly, “Mr. Ericsson, since you know just where the place is, take a hurricane lamp and a stake and get down there. We’ll keep watch through the peephole. When we’ve got your lamp in the center of our sight, we’ll signal with a flashlight three times from this window. Drive your stake into the sand at that point, and we’ll join you there with shovels.”
“I’ll get ’em!” shrieked a voice; and they turned to see Long John’s peg vanishing. Fifteen minutes later, with Inga sprinting ahead, they thrashed through the scrub toward the explorer’s light.
They found Ericsson standing on an outcrop of silvery rock, smiling. “No hurry,” he said. “And no treasure—not till low tide tomorrow morning, anyway.”
Ericsson’s stake was protruding from four and a half feet of ocean.
Nikki found herself able to play the part of a nervous city female with no difficulty at all. How could Inga sleep? she thought as she thrashed about in the twin bed. When in a few hours she was going to be the heiress of a pirate’s treasure?… The... piracy of that pirate... to bury it so that for half the elapsed time the Atlantic rolled over it... He ought to be hanged...
Then Nikki remembered that he had been hanged; and that was her last thought until a hand clamped over her mouth and a light flashed briefly into her eyes and Ellery’s voice said affectionately in her ear, “You certainly sleep soundly. Get into some clothes and join me outside. And don’t wake anyone or I’ll give you a taste of the cat.”
Nikki slipped out of the house into a dead and lightless world. She could not even make out the terrace. But Ellery rose out of the void and led her down the path and into the woods, his grip forbidding noise. Not until they had gone several hundred yards did he turn on his flashlight, and even then he cupped its beam.
“Is it all right to talk now?” Nikki asked coldly. “What time is it? Where are we going? And why are you practically naked? And do you think this is cricket? After all, Ellery, it’s not your treasure.”
“It’s not quite four, we’re getting the jump on our friends, I expect it will be wet and mucky work, and pirate loot calls for pirate methods. Would you rather go back to your hot little bed?”
“No,” said Nikki. “Though it all sounds pretty juvenile to me. How can you dig through sea water?”
“Low tide at 4:29 A.M. — I checked with a tide table at the house.”
Nikki began to feel excited all over again.
And she almost burst into a yo-ho-ho when they came out on the flat rock and saw Ericsson’s stake below them lapped by a mere inch or two of water.
The sun made its appearance with felicity. The first sliver of fried-egg radiance slipped over the edge of the sea’s blue plate just as Ellery’s spade rang a sort of breakfast bell. Nikki, who was flat on the wet sand with her head in the hole, and Ellery, whose salted hair bobbed a foot below Nikki’s chin, responded to the sound with hungry cries.
“It’s a metal box, Nikki!”
“Whee!”
“Don’t come down here! Get that windlass ready.”
“Where? What? What’s a windlass?”
“That drum up there for hoisting!” Before turning in the previous night the men had lugged all the portable paraphernalia they could find in the shed down to the site of the treasure. “And unwind the line and pay it down to me—”
“Yaaaaa-hoo!” Nikki ran around in her little bare feet madly.
Twenty minutes later they knelt panting on the sand at the edge of the hole, staring at a brassbound iron chest with a fat convex lid. It was a black and green mass of corruption. Shreds of crumbled stuff told where leather had once been strapped. And the chest was heavy—
“Can you open it?” whispered Nikki.
Ellery set the heels of his hands on the edge of the lid and got his shoulders ready. The lid cracked off like a rotten nutshell.
Nikki gulped. The celestial egg was sunnyside up now, and beneath it a million little frying lights danced.
The chest was heaped with jewels.
“Diamonds,” said Nikki dreamily. “Rubies. Emeralds. Pearls. Sapphires. So pretty. Look, Ellery. The booty of a real pirate. Wrenched from the throats and arms of dead Spanish women—”
“And the jewels in turn wrenched from their settings,” muttered Ellery, “most of which were probably melted down. But here are some they overlooked. An empty gold setting. A silver one—”