Completing the task on which he was engaged, the diver began his search for the sunken treasure. Day after day he and the old fisherman went out in a rowing-boat, threw a grapnel over the stern and dragged it about the seabed in the hope of lighting on the wreck. Many of the villagers laughed at them and thought them crazy, but the two treasure-hunters paid no heed. They just went ahead with their monotonous task, buoyed up with the hope of the treasure to come. The end of the first week saw them as far off the treasure as they had been on the first day. They dragged on through another week with a like result. A month of fruitless endeavour failed to rob them of their faith in the truth of the old story of the wreck. Week after week they searched the area in which the wreck was supposed to lie, tugging placidly at the oars, dragging the grapnel along the bottom. One day the fisherman was rowing slowly along when the diver felt his grapnel catch in something. He gave the rope a sharp tug, then another, but the grapnel held firmly. “We’ve got her,” he said. Marking the spot with a buoy, they rowed ashore for the diving suit and air-pump, then they went back to where the buoy floated on the surface. The diver donned his suit; the fisherman screwed the helmet securely into place, started to heave the handle of the air-pump as the diver went over the side and slid down the shot rope to the bottom. The ghost of the galleon greeted his eyes, the skeleton of the ship of long ago. For three centuries she had lain undisturbed in her watery grave, slowly rotting away until she had all but vanished. The diver climbed over the rotten remnants of the hulk into what had once been the hold of the ship. The place was full of weed; fish fled at the approach of the strange monster that was invading their domain; barnacles and sea-growth flourished on the decaying timbers. With the same patience that had enabled him to locate the wreck, the diver searched the seabed until at last he came on what appeared to be several small barrels. He went up to them, tapped them. The much talked-of treasure was his at last. Beneath his fingers were solid stacks of Spanish doubloons, from which the wood had long since perished, leaving the coins still shaped like the barrels into which the Spaniards had packed them when they set out on that ill-fated expedition of theirs to conquer England. [Illustration: TREASURE HUNTERS EXAMINING THE BED OF TOBERMORY BAY IN THE ISLE OF MULL THROUGH A SPECIAL INSTRUMENT INVENTED FOR THE PURPOSE]