Prassade and Persilope then, with Mancha and Herman, of course, two of the keepers—the same who had buried it—and several strong men beside, set out for the cache of the King’s Desire. They went north and seaward by a shorter route than the Ward had taken, since they had not the same need of doubling for concealment. They passed the upper limit of redwoods and came to a region of thin, spiked spruce and pines, knuckly promontories encrusted with lichen sticking out of a thin, whitish soil. By afternoon they struck into a gully where an opaque stream purled in shallow basins and spilled in thin cascades to gravely levels. Here they began to take note of landmarks and measure distances. First there was a sheer jut of country rock, stained black by the dribble of a spring. Below it a half moon of pond as green as malachite. Directly up from that, on the shoulder of a stony hill, five pines, slender and virginal, stood circlewise, bent somehow by weather stress to the postures of dancing. They balanced in the wind and touched the tips of their stretched, maiden boughs. From here, ascending, the stream spindled to a thread, and led the eye under the combe of the ridge to a high round boulder, gripped mid-long of its fall by the curled roots of a pine. Under the boulder was the cache of the King’s Desire. I asked Herman afterward how soon the intimation of what they were to find there began to reach them, and he said, to himself not at all. He remembered Prassade asking of Noche, if this was the trail they had taken with the Ward, and the old man’s quick, sidewise glance that questioned why he asked. He remembered as they came by the green water, one of the keepers stooping to examine something, and Noche beginning to twitch and bristle like a dog striking an unwelcome trail. They came to the boulder. Signs of the recent rains were all about, the half-uprooted pine that braced it showed a slight but fresh abrasion of the bark. The two keepers had their heads together, whispering apart. They would not believe it! Even when the first scraping of the wooden shovels showed the soil loose and yielding, and below the percolating dampness of the rains they found filling of fresh, dry gravel, they would not believe the cache had been rifled. The jewels were in a great chest, red and rotten, corded up with skins, half a man’s length under ground. So said Noche, who had buried them. They dug; they were waist deep, they were up to their armpits; they dug steadily. Suddenly there was a sound of the shovels striking solid. They exclaimed with relief. Noche was old, and in ten years had forgotten. Then the diggers cleared the ground and showed the solid country rock.