Summary

The Treasure in the Forest is a suspense story, depicted as a third-person narrative, relating the fate of two treasure hunters, Evans and Hooker who murder a Chinese man and steal his treasure map, which locates a buried stash of gold ingots (blocks of several valuable things).
The story begins with two characters Evans and Hooker who were heading towards a coral island in the heat of the noon sun, after having paddled all night from the mainland through the sea in a canoe in search of Spanish treasure.
Hooker is studying a map of the treasures, which the narrator reveals they have stolen from a Chinaman, Chang-hi, whom they murdered during the theft. Chang-hi had by chance discovered the treasure left behind by a shipwrecked A Spanish galleon (ship), and had decided to rebury it elsewhere, at a location revealed by his map. They are very much tired and hungry as if they had no food to eat. They see the map and gets puzzled by the dashes shown on the map. Evans and Hooker identify the spot indicated on the map, and after beaching their canoe they strike into the interior of the island, through the forest.
As Hooker is sailing the boat, Evans falls asleep and sees a little fire with three Chinese people sitting around it in his dream. They were talking about the Spanish treasure which a Chinese man Chang-hi had got on an Island after being shipwrecked and he wanted to take those treasures away from there. They murder Chang-hi, a Chinese man, brutally and steal the treasure map. When Chang-hi gets murdered he grins at them. They travel by canoe sailing towards the coral island. However, neither of them understands the intention behind it. They follow the map and soon discover a forest, then a pile of stones just like the map. But then they find a man corpse full of bruises laid beside the purple and swollen body, which they assume is Chang-hi’s worker who decided to take advantage by himself seeing the dug hole and some gold.
The two men load as much of the gold as they can drag back to the canoe in Evans’s jacket and set off, but after about a hundred yards Evans’’s arms start to ache and eventually faints. Hooker, in rearranging the ingots on the jacket after Evans’’s collapse, himself feels a thorn prick, and at last, Hooker then realizes the true meaning that Chang-hi had behind his grin. Chang-hi had covered his treasure with thorns “similar to those the Dyaks poison (native groups of Borneo-blow pipe with lethal poison at its tip) and use in their blowing tubes. The story ends as Hooker lies dying alongside the “still quivering” body of his companion.