Little by little as I studied the paper I began to piece out a story of crime and horror which struck strangely familiar to my mind. Here was one who had been searching for that gold; another victim of the curse, I told myself, darkly wondering how many had been the victims of the outraged gods if the whole tale of them were numbered. He too had been one of a party who had found and handled the gold; but as usual--and the recurrence of the thing seemed absurd in its inevitability--there had been strife and disagreement. As in the old story of the manuscript, and also in the fanciful yarn of my father's, there had been treachery and betrayal. The stone that guarded the cave-mouth had been rolled back upon a party of wretches imprisoning them alive. History had repeated itself, I thought. The original crime of the Mad Captain and his followers had been perpetrated a second time, not only in imagination, as in my father's yarn, but in reality. But there was a difference. As I examined the script, making out here and there another word, and another, I began to find myself on a clue worth all the rest of the story. When once removed the boulder that had guarded the cave-mouth had been so delicately poised that a couple of men could roll it back into place, though it had needed twenty with ropes and levers to heave it up from the hole it covered. But the thing that arrested me was that the boulder had originally been at the end of a short but steep passage rising up from the sea into the land, and the entrance it had sealed was a large hole in the floor of the tunnel. When the great stone was released, instead of merely falling back into place, its impetus as it fell had carried it over the pit it had first covered, and it had rushed to the mouth of the tunnel itself where it had stuck, jammed immovably in the narrow opening. I didn't need to cast about in my mind for a possible locality to suit the description; I knew at once it was the Dragon's Mouth. I had been right in my surmise that if that tongue were drawn back into the throat the mystery would be laid bare. No wonder the priest's map had failed to give my father the clue he had needed. By the rolling of that stone the trace of the pit-mouth had been destroyed.