"Fifty-nine! _Sixty_!"
We stopped together, and the suppressed sobs of Barbara Herndon were the
only sounds that broke the little stillness that followed. There was no
way out! The darkness, so it seemed to us, was thicker than ever!
"Nothing doing," muttered Holman. "I counted right, didn't I?"
"I think so," I answered huskily.
"Sixty paces exactly, and here's the wall alongside us."
My fingers groped along the moist rock. I felt stunned. Now that the
test had been made it seemed insanity to connect a chant that I heard at
Levuka with a waterfall in a cavern on the Isle of Tears. But why had
Toni been killed? Why had Leith exhibited such curiosity about the song
when he heard me relating the incident to the two sisters on board the
yacht?
My fingers came to a crevice in the wall as the question presented a
bold front to the doubt that had gripped me. The fissure was some four
feet wide, and my exclamation made Holman put a question.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing," I answered. Wrecked hopes had made me cautious. Still I felt
certain that I had remembered those words for some purpose.
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