They had hoarsely debated until they had come to an agreement, and, having concluded their meal, each man lighted his inch of sooty clay, picked up his shovel or his crow, or whatever else had been brought off from the barque, and marched to the nearest of the clump of trees, at the foot of which they fell to digging. Every man was in motion: they laboured with incredible activity, and with such faces of rapturous expectation as again and again forced a smile from me, depressed, anxious, miserable as I was. With my hands clasped behind me, I paced to and fro, watching and waiting. Now that the island had proved an absolute fact, I could no longer feel certain that the gold was a madman’s fancy. Nay, I was now indeed imagining that it was all true, and that Braine had fallen crazy through possession of his incommunicable secret acting upon a mind congenitally tinctured with insanity, and irremediably weakened yet by the horrible sufferings he had undergone before he was cast away upon this spot. Yet never did I glance at the barque without a prayer trembling from my heart to my lips that the wretches might not find the gold. An old scheme, that this unexpected lighting upon the island had quickened and given shape to, was fast maturing in my mind, even while I paced that stretch of grass; but the discovery of the money would render it abortive. I watched the seamen with an interest as keen as their own, but with hopes diametrically opposite. The soil was dry, stubborn, perhaps through the intermingling of coral-grit and the coarse fibres of its herbage. Yet there were many of them, and every man worked with desperate energy, and presently they had dug up a good space to some little depth. I awaited with a beating heart the exultant shout which I might be sure the first man who turned up one of the yellow pieces would raise. They continued to toil in silence. Presently the carpenter, resting his chest upon his shovel, with the sweat falling in rain from his crimson face, bawled out to me: ‘How fur down, d’ye think, we ought to keep on a-digging?’ ‘I would give up at two feet,’ said I. ‘Captain Braine and his friend would not find strength to go much beyond two feet.’ One of the fellows plumbed with his crow, and, bringing it out, with his thumb at the height of the level, cried: ‘It’s more’n two feet already.’ They dug a little longer, nevertheless; then a few curses ran among them, and the carpenter, with a note of irritation in his voice, roared out: ‘No good going on here. Try this clump.’ He walked over to it and drove his shovel into the soil. The men gathered about him, and in a trice were all in motion again.