Early in the morning, Holmes dressed and went to see to his Irregulars. He found their interest flagging, but they bounced back with an infusion of cash and the reassurance that it would be either that day, or not at all. Young Mr Garcia assured him they wouldn't take their eyes off the place, an assurance rather spoilt by his subsequent discovery that the very young lad who was supposed to be watching at that moment was instead standing at his elbow, unwilling to miss anything. However, as Hammett had not yet left the apartment, no harm was done.

By seven o'clock, the two detectives-turned-archaeologists were at the house. Both were dressed in their toughest, most impenetrable clothing, but the bramble thicket laughed at them, inflicting a thousand scratches and punctures. Hammett appeared shortly after eight, and although he expressed his willingness to pitch in, he seemed not unhappy to be assigned a seat and the position of look-out. Later in the morning, Long came walking down the drive, although he, too, ended up sitting in the sun while Russell and Holmes took turns with the saws, branch clippers, and spades they had found in the garden shed. Hammett rolled and smoked one cigarette after another and began to tell them about a story he was writing, its protagonist an operative in a detective agency rather like that of the Pinkertons, only more efficient and ethical. Long contributed suggestions from his own broad reading of the literature of the masses, while the other two sweated and cursed and drew themselves mental goals, after which they swore to move the hunt over to the other marked square, the one where Dr Ming had suggested mere money might lie.

Well past several of those mental goals, but before the final one could be reached, Russell's spade hit something metal.

All four of them went still. Without taking up the tool, Russell squatted and brushed at the crumbly soil. She slipped off the leather gloves (also from the shed, and half eaten by mice, but better than nothing) to feel around the base of the spade. In a minute, she tugged at an object a foot long and half that wide: a biscuit tin, surprisingly heavy, freshly dented and rusty around the corners. She handed it to Holmes, who most manfully waited as she dug around to see if there was anything else. Almost immediately, her fingers encountered a second such object, equally weighty, this one advertising the contents as chocolates, which she wrestled out of the ground and gave to him. Two seemed to be all, and she followed Holmes along the path-way they had hacked and to the kitchen door, where they kicked off their dirt-encrusted shoes and went into the scullery to scrub the worst of the grime from their hands while Hammett and Long spread one of the house's dust-cloths over the table.