Free The Treasure at Poldarrow Point (An Angela Marchmont Mystery) by Clara Benson Page A

of politeness since he had, after all, found the cave first, but was relieved when he shook his head.
    ‘No, I thank you,’ he said. ‘I must return to work now. Goodbye. Perhaps we shall meet again soon.’
    ‘Oh yes, goodbye,’ said Barbara, then turned her attention back to the cave and promptly forgot about the strange man, who had picked up his knapsack and was already heading back towards the path, clanking as he went.
    She ducked in through the low entrance and followed the passage which, after six or seven feet, took a sharp turn to the right. Beyond that point it was too dark to see, so she took out her electric torch and switched it on. By the dim light she saw that a few yards ahead the little tunnel opened out into a larger space. She hurried forward, then stopped and looked about her, waving the torch around as she turned her head this way and that. She was in a cave of perhaps thirty feet square which had presumably been hollowed out by the tides of many millions of years. Water dripped from the ceiling, and the walls glistened and oozed with festoons of clinging seaweed. Underfoot, rippled paths of wet sand wound in and out among dark rock pools. The air was damp and chill.
    Sure that she had found the right place, Barbara started forward into the cave and began to explore it carefully. She walked slowly around it, shining her torch on any recess that might be the entrance to the tunnel, or any large patch of seaweed that might possibly conceal an opening. After three circuits of the place, however, by which time she had in desperation begun pulling aside smaller and smaller patches of seaweed that could not possibly hide anything, she was forced to concede that there was no tunnel here. The thought rather cheered her, since it meant that the discovery was still all her very own to make without any interference from Swiss scientists, and she emerged into the sunshine undaunted and as determined as ever.
    She proceeded along the bottom of the cliff, examining the face carefully but finding nothing—although she noted that the tide had advanced surprisingly far while she had been inside the cave. She had now reached the very furthest extremity of the Poldarrow Point headland without finding the smugglers’ tunnel, and there seemed to be nowhere else to look: any farther on and she would be past the headland and into the other side of Tregarn Bay proper.
    ‘Where on earth can it be?’ she said to herself. ‘I’ve searched every inch of this cove, it seems, but I haven’t found anything. Could that cave be the entrance after all? Perhaps the tunnel has been blocked by a rock-fall, or something. Or perhaps it’s back there, where the path comes out onto the beach.’
    She clambered up to sit on a large, flat outcrop at the base of the cliff and gazed back in the direction she had come, searching for any signs she might have missed, but saw nothing that looked a likely prospect. She sighed and began to spin around idly on her seat, debating whether or not to leave the search for today and come back tomorrow, as the tide was approaching rapidly now. It would be lunch-time soon, too, and Barbara realized that she was hungry. Then she remembered that Cook had promised to bake some more scones, and that decided it. She was going back.
    She spun herself round one more time—too violently, for she lost her balance and before she could regain it, fell off the rock and landed six feet below on the far side of it.
    ‘Oof!’ she said, and then, ‘Ow!’
    She lay there for a moment or two to get her breath back, then sat up gingerly and rubbed her elbow. Nothing seemed to be broken. She was about to utter a word that would certainly be forbidden at school, when her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open, for there it was—the entrance to the smugglers’ tunnel, as plain as the eye could see, right there before her. No wonder she had missed it: the slab of rock hid it completely from the beach, and except at