"Don't mistake me," I made haste to say. "I meant it wholly in a congratulatory sense."
"She has changed," Conetta admitted, adding: "But dear me! we have all changed."
"'All the world's queer, excepting thee and me, and sometimes even thee's a little queer'," I quoted. "What changes have you remarked—particularly?"
"For one, Major Terwilliger is just a selfish, peevish old man, utterly impossible to live with," she said calmly.
"Amen to that. Yet, one of these days you will probably have to reckon with him as a member of your household. Go on."
She went on, paying no attention to what I had said about householding the major.
"The professor is a dear, just as you'd expect him to be, and so is Mrs. Professor. Annette is as brave as brave, and the way she is keeping up is only equaled by Jack's adorable care of her, which is at the bottom of his constant breezy assurances that each day will be the last of our Crusoeing."
"And Billy?" I prompted.
"Billy is a dear, too. He has changed less than any one, I think. Yesterday, at supper-time, he nearly broke my heart. Perhaps you remember that he got up and went away while we were eating, saying that he'd forgotten something. A few minutes later I went back to the spring to get some fresh water for Aunt Mehitable and found him sharing his supper with Tige. He'd heard what Major Terwilliger had said about our wasting food on the dog when we'd probably need it ourselves. Wouldn't that make you weep?"
"The dog is much more worthy of his rations than the major is of what he consumes," I averred. "Tige is at least willing to do his best if anybody will show him how. Any more transmogrifications?"
"Lots of them. Possibly you've noticed that Mrs. Van Tromp no longer tries to shoo Billy away from Edie. That's a miracle in itself. Then there is Madeleine: I have always thought her rather—um—well, you know; rather stand-offish and maybe a bit self-centered. Dick, she is an angel! The way she devotes herself, body and soul, to that father of hers, and still finds time and the heart to chirk the rest of us up, is beyond all praise."
"You can't get a quarrel out of me on that score," I returned. "Madeleine is all that you say she is, and more. As for her father, I guess we can pass him up. Between us two, he is no more sick than I am. And I don't believe he has changed a particle; we are merely coming to know him better as he really is, and always has been."
"I have known him for a long time," Conetta said thoughtfully. Then she agreed with me: "We'll leave him out; he cancels himself on the minus side of the equation, as you used to say of certain people we knew in the old days at home."
I wasn't half sure enough of myself to be willing to have her drag in the old days, so I urged her to go on with her cataloguing of our fellow castaways, saying: "You haven't completed the list yet."
"There is one more to be omitted—Hobart Ingerson," she said soberly, with a shadow of deep disgust coming into her eyes.
"Will Madeleine omit him?" I asked quickly.
"If she doesn't—after what we've been compelledto see and feel and endure! Dick, it's dreadful; simply dreadful!"
"Yet she will marry him," I insisted—purely to hear what my companion would say to that.
"It is unbelievable. What possible motive could she have in doing such an unspeakable thing?"
"A few minutes ago you called her an angel; perhaps it will be the angelic motive. Her father needs money; needs a very considerable sum of money, and needs it badly. She knows of the need—though I think she doesn't know the immediate and exciting cause of it—and she also knows that Ingerson is willing to buy and pay."
"How perfectly horrible!" said my watchmate, with a shudder. And then: "What a pity it is that Madeleine's money was all swallowed up in that bank failure out West."
I smiled when she said that. Madeleine's fortune hadn't gone in any bank failure, neither out West nor back East. This was only another of Holly Barclay's plausible little fictions.
"You mean?—" I suggested.
"I mean that if she had money of her own she might buy her freedom. I imagine it is purely a financial matter with Mr. Holly Barclay. If she could only find some of the Spaniards' gold—find it for herself so that it would belong to her. . . . Wouldn't that be splendid!"
This was something entirely new to me, and I said: "What gold is this you are talking about?"
She looked around at me with wide-open eyes.
"Why—haven't you heard?" Then: "Oh, I remember; Bonteck was telling us the story last evening, while you and the professor were out at the other signal fire." And thereupon she repeatedthe old tale of the siege and wreck of the Spanish galleon in Queen Elizabeth's reign, with the tradition of the hidden treasure whose hiding place the survivors had refused to betray—paying for their refusal with their lives.
"Of course, that is only a sea yarn—one of the many that are told about those old days and the doings in them," was my comment. "You knew that while you were listening to it, didn't you?"
"Oh, yes; I supposed it wasn't true. I kept telling myself that Bonteck was only trying to start some new interest that would keep us from going stark mad over this wretched imprisonment, and the watching and waiting that never amounts to anything. It's serving a purpose, too. Most of the young ones are turning treasure hunters—going in couples. Jerry Dupuyster was trying to persuade Beatrice to slip away just as we left the camp. I heard him."
That small reference to Jerry and his disloyalty—which was becoming daily more and more apparent, and which I may have omitted to mention—moved me as one of the Yellowstone Park geysers is said to be moved by the dropping into it of a bar of soap.
"One of these fine days I'm going to beat Jerry Dupuyster until his best friend wouldn't recognize him," I said savagely.
Conetta laughed; the silvery little laugh that I was once besotted enough to believe that she kept especially for me.
"There goes your temper again. That is one thing that hasn't changed," she said. And then: "Poor Jerry! You'd have to have one hand tiedbehind you, wouldn't you?—just to be reasonably fair, you know."
There had been a time when I should have admitted that her gibe hit the mark, but that was before the transformed—or transforming—Jerry had been revealed to me.
"Nothing like that," I said. "He may not have confided it to you, but Jerry is a man of his hands. Hasn't he ever shown you the medal he won in England?"
She shook her head. "There are lots of things Jerry hasn't shown me—yet."
"Well, he has the medal, and it says he was the top-notcher in his class in some London boxing club. I give him credit for that; but just the same, there have been times during the past few days when I've had a curious longing to see how near I could come to throwing him bodily across the lagoon."
Again she said, "Poor Jerry!" and had the calm assurance to ask me what he had done to incur my ill will.
"Done!" I exclaimed. "What hasn't he done? If he thinks he is going to be allowed to play fast and loose with you for a chit of a girl like Beatrice Van Tromp——"
Once more her silvery laugh interrupted.
"Beatrice will be twenty-three on her next birthday. She is quite well able to fight her own battles, Mr. Dickie Preble."
"Oh, confound it all; you know what I mean!" I fumed hotly. "He has asked you to marry him, hasn't he?"
"He has," she replied quite calmly.
"Well, isn't that enough?"
"Don't be silly," she said. "You must try tocontrol that dreadful temper of yours. You're miles too touchy, Dickie, dear."
That remark was so true that I was constrained to wrench the talk aside from Jerry and the temperamental things by main strength.
"This treasure-hunting business," I said. "I'm wondering if that is what Bonteck has had on his mind? He has been acting like a man half out of his senses for the past few days. Surely you have noticed it?"
"Yes; and I've been setting it down as one of the most remarkable of the changes we have been talking about. You know how he was at first; he seemed to take everything as a matter of course, and was able to calm everybody's worries. But lately, as you say, he has been acting like a man with an unconfessed murder on his soul. I was so glad when he told us that galleon story last night. He was more like himself."
"He feels his responsibility, naturally," I suggested, "and it grows heavier the longer we are shut up here. While I think very few of us blame him personally for what has happened to us, he can't help feeling that if he hadn't planned the cruise and invited us, the thing wouldn't have happened at all."
"Of course; anybody would feel that way," she agreed, and after that she fell silent.
The weather on this day of our morning watch under the western palm-tree signal staff was much like that of all the other days; superlatively fine, and with the sun's warmth delightfully tempered by the steady fanning of the breeze which was tossing miniature breakers over the comb of the outer reef. Conetta's gaze was fixed upon thedistant horizon, and when I looked around I saw that her eyes were slowly filling with tears.
We had been comrades as well as lovers in the old days; which was possibly why I took her hand and held it, and why she did not resent the new-old caress.
"Tell me about it," I urged. "You used to be able to lean upon me once, Conetta, dear."
"It's just the—the loneliness, Dick," she faltered, squeezing the tears back. "We've all been dropping the masks and showing what we really are; but there is one mask that we never drop—any of us. We laugh and joke, and tell one another that to-morrow, or the next day at the very farthest, will see the end of this jolly picnic on Pirates' Hope. But really, in the bottom of our hearts, we know that it may never end—only with our lives. Isn't that so?"
I did not dare tell her the bald truth; that it might, indeed, come to a life-and-death struggle with starvation before our slender chance of rescue should materialize.
"I don't allow myself to think of that," I said quickly—and it was a lie out of the whole cloth. "And you mustn't let your small anchor drag, either, Connie, girl."
"I know; but I can't help hearing—and seeing. This morning early, before most of them were up, I saw Billy and Jack Grey trying to make some fishing lines and hooks; they were jollying each other about the fun they were going to have whipping the lagoon for a change of diet for us. And yesterday I happened to overhear the professor telling Bonteck that he had made a careful search of the island for the edible roots that grow wild inthe tropics, and hadn't been able to find any. Naturally, I knew at once what these things meant. The provisions are running low."
I nodded. It didn't seem worth while to try to lie to her.
"How far has it spread?" I asked. "Mrs. Van Tromp has been trying to keep the scarcity in the background. Does any one else know?"
"I can't say. But I do know that Mrs. Van Tromp is anxious to hide it from her girls—and from Madeleine."
"Why from Madeleine in particular?"
Again Conetta let her honest eyes look fairly into mine.
"Because Bonteck will not have Madeleine told. He means to spare her to the very last, no matter how much she has to waste upon her father's finicky appetite. Only this morning, she had to throw his entire breakfast away—after he'd messed with it and spoiled it—and get him another one!"
This was growing serious; much more serious than I had suspected; and I made a mental resolve to get the men of our party together on a short-rations basis at once. We had been hideously reckless with our stores; no one could deny that.
"This smudge will smoke for an hour or so longer," I pointed out, rising and helping Conetta to her feet. "Suppose we take a walk around on the south beach and look over toward my old stamping ground in Venezuela."
She made no objection, and once we were in motion we kept on, since the southern horizon was just as likely to yield the hopeful sign for which we were straining our eyes as any other. I am morally certain that I had no hunch to prompt the changeof view-point, and if my companion had, she didn't mention it. Nevertheless, when we had measured something less than half the length of the island, tramping side by side in sober silence over the white sands, the thing we had looked for in vain through so many weary hours appeared, and we both saw it at the same instant—the long, low smoke trail of a steamer blackening the line where sea and sky came together.
There was nothing to be done; absolutely nothing that we could do to attract the attention of those people who were just out of sight below the blurred horizon. For so long as we could distinguish the slowly vanishing harbinger of rescue we stood transfixed, hardly daring to breathe, hoping against hope that the steamer's course was laid toward us instead of away from us. But when the black of the smoke trail had faded to gray, and the gray became so faint that it was no longer separable from the slight haze of the sky-line, Conetta turned and clung to me, sobbing like a hurt and frightened child. It was too much, and I took her in my arms and comforted her, as I had once had the right to do.
And at that climaxing moment, out of the jungle thicketing behind us came Jerry Dupuyster and Beatrice Van Tromp. Beatrice was laughing openly, and on Jerry's face there was an inane smile that made me wish very heartily to kill him where he stood.
Conetta'sassertion, made in half-confidence to me, to the effect that Bonteck's attitude had changed, had ample backgrounding in the fact, and the cause—at least, so it appeared to me—was a sharp and growing anxiety.
Time and again I had surprised him sweeping the horizon with the field-glass, which was the only thing he had taken from his cabin stateroom when Lequat had come for us; and while there was nothing especially remarkable about this, I remembered that he had heretofore been turning this duty carelessly over to the various watchers at the signal fires. To be sure, the diminishing supply of eatables was a sufficient cause for any amount of anxiety, but I could not help thinking that there was something even bigger than the prospective food shortage gnawing at him. And that conclusion was confirmed on the day after Conetta and I had seen the steamer smoke, when I came upon him sitting on the beach at the farthest extremity of the island, with his head in his hands—a picture of the deepest dejection.
But with all this, he was still unremitting in his efforts to keep us from stagnating and slipping into that pit of despair which always yawns for the shipwrecked castaway. His revival of the legendarytale of the old Spanish plate ship, with its sequel of the starving crew and the buried treasure, was one of the expedients; and though gold was the one thing for which our marooned ship's company had the least possible use, the story served an excellent purpose.
Treasure-trove became, as one might say, the stock joke of the moment. Even the Sanfords went strolling about the island, prodding with sticks in the soft sand and turning up the fallen leaves in the wood; and Grey proposed jocularly that we stake off the beach in the vicinity of the skeleton wreck of the old galleon and fall to digging systematically, each on his own mining claim.
It was while this treasure-hunting diversion was holding the center of the stage that a thing I had been anticipating came to pass. Van Dyck suddenly broke over the host-and-guest barriers and read the riot act to Holly Barclay. I happened to be within earshot at the cataclysmic moment—it was one of the rare moments when Madeleine wasn't dancing attendance upon the sham invalid—and what Van Dyck said to Barclay was quite enough, I thought, to kill any possible chance he might have had as a suitor, with a father who stood ready to purchase immunity from just punishment at the price of his daughter's happiness.
"You are acting like a spoiled child, Barclay; that is the plain English of it," was Bonteck's blunt charge. "You are not sick, and if you were, it would be no excuse for the way you are tying your daughter down. Hereafter there will be a new deal. Madeleine must have some time every day for exercise and recreation."
"She won't take it," retorted the malingerer.
"She will if you tell her to; and you are going to insist upon it."
"I won't be bullied by you, Bonteck Van Dyck! You haven't anything to say—after the way you've let us in for this hellish nightmare. What business is it of yours if Madge chooses to make things a little less unbearable for me?"
"I am making it my business, and what I say goes as it lies. You turn Madeleine loose for her bit of freedom mornings and evenings. If you don't, I shall tell her what I know about her cousin's fortune, and what you have done with it."
Barclay crumpled up like a man hit in the stomach by a soft-nosed bullet, and the faded pink in his cheeks turned to a sickly copper yellow.
"Don't!" he gasped. "For God's sake, don't do that, Van Dyck! She may go—I'll make her go. I—I'm a sick man, I tell you, and you're trying to kill me! Go away and let me alone!"
Van Dyck came out of the palm clump where Barclay's hammock was swung—and found me eavesdropping.
"That was a piker's trick—listening in on me, Dick," he remonstrated half-impatiently. But, after all, I think he was glad he had a witness to Barclay's promise.
As may be imagined, Madeleine got her freedom, or some measure of it, immediately. It was Alicia Van Tromp who told me that a miracle had been wrought.
"I think Mr. Holly Barclay must be near his end," she said, with fine scorn. "He is insisting that Madeleine go for a walk. Wouldn't that shock you?"
When Madeleine made her appearance, I lookedto see Bonteck monopolize her, as he had earned the right to do; but what he did was to thrust me into the breach.
"You heard what I said to Holly Barclay and you know why I said it," was the way he put it up to me. "Madeleine hasn't been out of shouting distance of her father's hammock half a dozen times since the night we were marooned. Trot her all around the shop and make her think of something different. I'll square things for you with Conetta."
"You are about three years too late to square me with Conetta," I said sourly. "Have you anything else up your sleeve?"
"Several things; but I'm not going to show them to you just now. Be a good sport and help me out. I'd do as much for you, any day; in fact, I've done a good bit more as it is, if you only knew it. Here she comes; don't let Ingerson get in ahead of you. Take her around the south beach and come back the other way. Jump for it, you crabbed old woman-hater! It isn't every day in the week that you have such a privilege jammed down your throat."
It was no very difficult task—the capturing of Madeleine. She fell in promptly and amiably with my suggestion that we go on an exploring tramp around the beach line of the island, and I took her the roundabout way, as Bonteck had directed, to make her release last as long as possible.
I don't recall what we talked about at first, only I know that it was all perfectly innocuous. We had common ground enough—the people we both knew at home, a summer fortnight on the North Shore when she was a débutante and we were fellow guests in the same house group, a winter tour inCalifornia when we had both chanced to be members of the same party. But inevitably, and in spite of all I could do to turn it aside, the talk eventually drifted around to the present with its more than dubious possibilities.
"Conetta tells me that you were once ship-wrecked on this same bit of coral, Dick," was the way she switched from the North Shore house party to Pirates' Hope. "Doesn't it seem a most remarkable coincidence that you should have the misfortune to have to repeat that experience?"
"Compared with the other experience, this is a vacation pleasure camp," I said, trying to keep the serious aspect of things in the background. "We came ashore in a hurricane, the six of us who were not drowned, and had to live on cocoanuts and raw fish. We hadn't even the makings of a fire."
"How dreadful it must have been!" she exclaimed. "I should think that the memory of that terrible time would color every minute of the day for you now, with all the reminders there must be."
"Not a bit of it," I denied cheerfully. "'The mill doesn't grind with the water that has passed,' you know. And, besides, theMary Jane'ssurvivors were taken off in due time—which we may take as an earnest that we shall be picked up, sooner or later."
We had reached the extreme eastern point of the islet by this time, and she stopped and faced me.
"Are you really believing that, Dick?" she asked, with a little trembling of the pretty lips that she could not wholly control, though a blind man might have seen that she was trying to, hard enough.
"Of course I am."
"I'm afraid you wouldn't admit it to me if youweren't. You see, I can't forget that those others stayed here and starved—long ago, you know—the crew of theSanta Lucia."
"You have been listening to Bonteck's ghost stories," I jested. "You mustn't take them for matters of fact."
"But thereisa wreck," she insisted; "I mean besides the one on the reef opposite our camp."
"Oh, yes; there is a bare suggestion of an older wreck," I said. "We'll go and have a look at it, if you like. It's on the north beach, and we can go back that way. Would you care to see it?"
She nodded, and we strolled on in sober silence for another half-mile. I was afraid I was not making much of a success of the job of keeping her spirits up, and was beginning to wish very heartily that I had made Bonteck do his own jollying. Just why she should be looking upon the blue side of things at last, after she had been the one to do most of the cheering in the past, I couldn't imagine at first, but a bit later the solution—or a possible solution—came to me. Perhaps the invalid, knowing that he was going to lose some of his hold upon her through Van Dyck's insistence upon more freedom for her, had been pressing the Ingerson claim still harder.
The wreck of the galleon—if, indeed, the few bits of barnacled timber and rusting ironwork could, by any stretch of imagination, be dated back to a period so remote as that of the conquest of Peru—was in the bight of a little bay, well sheltered by the tallest of the palms, which effectually screened it from our camp end of the island. It wanted possibly half an hour of sunset when we came upon the few dumb relics, and the shadows of the palmswere making weird traceries upon the white sand of the beach.
Assuming that the largest of the charred and blackened "bones" was the stem of the ancient wreck, it was to be inferred that the ship had entered the lagoon bay through the seaward opening in the outer reef, had been beached bows on, and had so lain and burned, or rotted. Assuming, again, that the vessel had really been one of the old, high-bowed galleons, it was apparent that the beaching had been done with considerable force; a drive so hard that the bowsprit of the ship must have been thrust like a huge pointing finger into the jungle thicketing, which, at this point, ran well down to the edge of the lagoon.
It was Van Dyck who made this hypothetical platting of the beaching of the vessel for us; Bonteck himself, who had slipped ghost-like out of the palm shadows to join us while we were trying to trace the skeleton outline of the ship's timbering in the obliterating sands.
"I've been all over this ground before," he explained, and for once in a way he seemed to have thrown off the burden, whatever it was, that had been weighing him down. "More than that, I've waded around here when the tide was out and made good on some of the guesses."
"Are you counting upon finding the lost treasure?" I joked; and he took me up promptly.
"Why not? Stranger things than that have happened, haven't they?"
"You don't really believe that part of the story, do you, Bonteck?" said Madeleine, with an amused smile.
"All or none," he answered cheerfully. "And,again, I say, why not? Don't you want to take a few shares in the Great Galleon Treasure Company, Unlimited?"
I thought it a happy circumstance that she could meet him playfully in the open field of badinage.
"Of course I do," she returned. "If I had a spade, I'd dig somewhere. Only I shouldn't know where to dig."
"Suppose we figure out the probabilities," Bonteck suggested, and if his enthusiasm wasn't real, it was an exceedingly good imitation. "The first requirement, of course, is to take the old story at its face value. Just imagine Sir Francis Drake'sPasha, or it might have been theSwan, out yonder on the other side of the reef, pouring hot shot into the poor, old, strandedSanta Luciahere on the beach. The Spaniards would take the treasure out over the bows, because that would be the only sheltered place, don't you see? Does that suggest anything?"
I think I have already said that Miss Barclay's gift, or rather one of them, was an acutely responsive mentality; or if I haven't, I meant to. She was standing with Van Dyck upon the exact spot the Spaniards—real or mythical—must have stood to be out of cannon-shot reach in unloading the treasure. Without a moment's hesitation she took up the thread of Bonteck's imaginings.
"If they started from here they would run for the nearest woods, wouldn't they?—keeping their ship between them and the English cannons. That is what I should have done." And then, purely in a spirit of keeping up the fiction, I am sure: "Let us follow them and see where they went."
Bonteck agreed at once. "Come on," he said;and the three of us set out to cross the island in a diagonal line, looking back from time to time to keep the fancied direction of the Spaniards retreating from their burning ship.
It was in a little open space in the midst of a palm and palmetto thicket that we paused.
"This is the place," Madeleine announced calmly. "Meaning to hide our treasure chest, we wouldn't go all the way across to the other beach. We'd hurry and scrape away the leaves and things here in the thickest part of the woods, and dig a hole, and——"
"Well?" said Bonteck, with what seemed a certain breathless eagerness; "Go on and pick out your place. We'll dig for you—Preble and I."
"You haven't anything to dig with," she laughed, and then the laugh died, and I saw her eyes widen and her lip begin to tremble. But in an instant she was laughing again.
"I believe I had almost hypnotized myself," she confessed, with a little grimace of self-consciousness. "Do you see that white stone over there under the vines? The thought came to me like a flash, 'That stone was put there to mark the spot!' You have been making it all too uncannily real, Bonteck."
Van Dyck crossed the little open space and pulled away a mass of trailing vines so that we could examine the stone. It was a fragment of white coral the size, and approximately the shape, of a ship's capstan.
"It's a bit odd, anyway," Bonteck commented, still apparently in the grip of the curious eagerness. "There are no loose stones anywhere else on the island, so far as I know, excepting the small pieces we used in building our camp fireplace. You'd saythis is a chunk of the outer reef, wouldn't you, Dick?"
"Why—yes, possibly," I answered. "But in that case it must have been quarried and carried ashore in some way, and——"
Bonteck straightened up and turned quickly to Madeleine.
"Suppose we try to be serious for a minute or so, if we can," he offered, with what appeared to me to be forced soberness. "There is about one chance in a hundred million that there really was a buried treasure. That hundred millionth chance is yours, Madeleine. Neither Dick nor I would have noticed this piece of coral hidden under the vines if you hadn't pointed it out. Shall we turn it over for you?"
"I should never forgive you if you didn't," she laughed back.
"All right. But it must be distinctly understood that if there should happen to be a gold mine under it, the treasure is all yours. Do you agree to that?"
"Of course it will be mine," she answered in cheerful mockery. "I'll take Dick, here, for my witness. He will testify that it was I who first saw the stone—won't you, Dick? But we must make haste. It is growing dark, and I must go back to father."
We heaved at the coral boulder, Bonteck and I, and rolled it aside out of its bed in the soft, sandy soil. I was about to say that we couldn't dig very far with only our bare hands for tools, when Bonteck produced a huge clasp-knife of the kind that sailors carry.
"Where shall we dig—right where the stone lay?" he asked, with a queer grin.
"Right exactly where the stone lay," said theyoung woman, charmingly precise and mandatory.
We went down on our knees and fell to work as soberly as if the entire thing were not a poor flimsy bit of comedy designed to push the growing anxieties and fear tremblings a trifle farther into the background. Bonteck loosened the friable soil with the blade of his big knife, and I scooped it out, dog-fashion, with my hands. In a few minutes we had a hole knee-deep, and as we went on enlarging it, I saw, or thought I saw, a strange transformation taking place in Van Dyck. The playful manner had fallen away from him like a cast-off garment. His jaw was set and he was breathing hard. And when he took his turns in the little pit he dug like a madman.
It was not until after we had dug down to the pure white sand of the subsoil that he gave over and turned to Madeleine with a look in his eyes that mirrored, or seemed to mirror, a shock of half-paralyzing astoundment. I had never suspected him of having any histrionic ability, but if he were not really shocked, he was certainly giving a faultless rendering of a man completely dazed.
"It's—it's gone!" he exclaimed mechanically. "You've been robbed, Madeleine; it was yours—all yours, by the right of discovery—and—and it's gone!"
"What sheer nonsense!" she retorted lightly. "You are the one who is hypnotized now, Bonteck." And then, carrying out the little comedy to its proper curtain: "Of course, it is very singular that we shouldn't find the hidden treasure; singular, and dreadfully disappointing—after one has worked one's imagination up to the point of believing anything and everything. But we've had our laughout of it, and that is worth while, isn't it? Now we must really be getting back to the others. It will be dark before long, and we mustn't keep Mrs. Van Tromp's dinner waiting."
Van Dyck was standing at the edge of the hole, still figuring as one helplessly dumfounded—and I wondered why he persisted in throwing himself so extravagantly into the part-playing. While Madeleine was speaking, I stooped to pass some of the sand of the pit bottom through my fingers. It was almost as fine as flour, and quite as white, but upon closer inspection I saw that it was flecked in spots with bits of black humus—humus like that formed by well-rotted wood.
"Hold on a minute," I said, seized suddenly with a notion that was to the full as absurd as that which had led us to follow the imagined trail of the Spaniards retreating from their burning ship; and catching up Van Dyck's dropped clasp-knife I stepped into the shallow hole we had dug.
There is no twilight to speak of in the tropics, and the sunset glow was fading rapidly, but there was still light enough to show the place in the pit bottom where the bits of black humus were thickest. At sight of them I became, in my turn, a foolish madman, postulating a frantic gopher with a time limit set in which he may hope to outdig the scratching dogs in his burrow. But there was at least a saving grain of method in my madness. Every fresh stab of the knife brought up more of the rotted wood, and presently the blade struck something hard and unyielding.
"Hold your breath, you two," I gasped, and groping hastily in the loosened sand with my hands I found the hard thing that the knife blade hadstruck; found and unearthed it and straightened up to lay it at Madeleine's feet.
It was a rudely cast ingot of dull-colored metal, and its weight, in proportion to its size, was sufficient proof of its quality. It was unmistakably a billet of gold.
Forthe next few minutes after the discovery of the bar of gold I think no one of the three of us was wholly sane. Van Dyck and I fell over each other in our eagerness to find out if there were more of them, and as we dug deep in the treasure grave Madeleine knelt at the edge of it and was to the full as daft as either of us.
Digging and groping by turns, we flung out bar after bar of the precious metal until there was a heap of forty of them piled up in the little glade. Forty was the exact number. When it was complete we found that we had penetrated to the under-layer of humus which told us that we had come to the rotted bottom of the chest in which the treasure had been buried.
I think Madeleine was the first to break the spell of breathless silence that had fallen upon us while we were digging and dog-scratching in the soft sand.
"It can't be true! I can't believe it!" she said, over and over again. "We are dreaming; wemustbe dreaming—all of us!"
Bonteck had hoisted himself out of the pit and was poising one of the gold bars in his hands.
"It is a gloriously substantial dream, Madeleine, dear," he said gravely, ignoring me as if I were deaf and dumb and blind, or altogether of no account."For a rough guess, I should say that these bars will weigh thirty-five or forty pounds apiece, if not more—say a quarter of a million, in round numbers, for the lot. It isn't a fortune, dear, but it will serve to—to buy you——"
She broke in with a frantic little cry of protest.
"But it isn't mine, Bonteck! It's—it's——"
It was at this crisis that Van Dyck deigned to take notice of me as being present and able to answer to my name.
"She says it isn't hers, Preble. Tell her; make her understand."
"It is most unquestionably yours, Madeleine," I assured her. "You will remember that Bonteck told you there was one chance in a hundred million. That chance has won out, and it has fallen to you, incredible as it may seem. By all the laws of the treasure seekers, the find is yours."
"But it must have belonged to some one, at some time!" she objected, honest to the core.
I nodded. "It really belonged to the poor Peruvians from whom the Spaniards looted it. We are three or four centuries too late to restore it to the unfortunate Incas. I'm afraid you'll have to take it and keep it for your own."
"Of course she will keep it!" Bonteck thrust in. "The only question is, what shall be done with it now?"
At this we held a hurried consultation over the disposition of the discovery, with Madeleine insisting that we two ought at least to share the miraculous treasure with her.
"Dick hates money, and I have too much of it, as it is," was the manner in which Bonteck disposed of the sharing suggestion; and then we decidedhastily upon two reasonable immediacies; we would rebury the gold, replace the coral boulder, and leave things as nearly as might be as we had found them. And for the second reasonable conclusion it was agreed that we should say nothing to any of the other castaways at present. It could do no good to tell them; and, as Bonteck sagely argued, it might do a good bit of harm by stirring up things at a time when we all needed to sit tight in the boat.
We were working by starlight by the time we got the hole filled up and the chunk of coral rolled back into place, and we could hardly see well enough to be certain that we had removed all traces of our late activities. Hoping that we had, and promising ourselves that we would return in daylight to make sure, we set out upon the shortest way back to the camp, which was along the north beach.
Madeleine hadn't said anything more about the ownership of the treasure while we were reinterring it, but now she began again.
"I hope you're not sweeping me off my feet—you two," she said. "I still can't make myself believe that I have any better right to that gold than you have—or as much."
"Of course you have," Bonteck insisted. "Didn't you point out the stone to us, I'd like to know?"
"But I should never have been there to point it out if you hadn't shown the way," she asserted.
"We needn't split hairs over that part of it," I put in. "And your argument doesn't hold, at that. It was your suggestion that we follow the trail, or the imaginary trail, from the old wreck to the—alsoimaginary—place where the Spaniards would be likely to hide their gold. Don't you remember?"
"Oh," she laughed; "if I'm to be held accountable for every silly thing I say——"
Once more Bonteck went over the equities patiently and painstakingly. We, he and I, were only bystanders. In no possible viewing of the circumstances could either of us lay claim to any essential part in the miraculous discovery. Waxing eloquently argumentative, he made the establishment of her right and title to the gold fill up the entire time of our return, and if he didn't succeed in fully convincing her, he was at least able to talk her down and silence her.
At the camp under the palms at the western extremity of our kingdom we found wild excitement in the saddle, and our delayed return passed unremarked. Just at sunset, Billy Grisdale and Edith Van Tromp, who had been on watch at the western signal fire, had seen the smoke of a steamer. They had lost the hopeful sight in the gathering dusk, and had raced in to spread the good news; racing back again almost immediately, with a snatched supper in their hands, to build the signal fire higher.
With this announcement to upset monotonous routine, the meal, which, for the sake of preserving the most foolish of the civilized conventions, we were still calling "dinner," was late, and it was eaten by the more sanguine as the children of Israel ate their first Passover, in haste and with staff in hand. Both Billy and Edith had been hopefully positive that the ship they had seen was headed toward the island, and the bare prospectof an early rescue was enough to key excitement to the unnerving pitch.
But as time passed and nothing happened, the inevitable reaction set in, and I think we all sank deeper into the pit of depression for the sudden awakening of hope. While Annette and Alicia and Beatrice Van Tromp were clearing away the remains of the belated meal, Grey drew me aside.
"You've kept your head better than any of us, Preble," he began, "and there is a thing that ought to be threshed out before it gets any older. They are saying now that Bonteck is either crazy in his head, or else he is the greatest villain unhung."
"Who is saying it?" I demanded.
"I don't know where it started, but with Ingerson and the major and Barclay to reckon with, it wouldn't be very hard to trace it back to its source. The charge is that Van Dyck has been robbing the commissary—spiriting the provisions away a little at a time and hiding them out."
I knew that this was true, so far as the liquors were concerned, but I kept my mouth shut about that.
"What motive is assigned?" I asked.
"It is only hinted at, but the hint is gruesome enough, the Lord knows. They say we are coming to the end; to a time when there will be nothing left but a survival of the strongest. And they say, also, that if Bonteck isn't a bit off his head, he is cold-bloodedly fixing things so that he will be able to outlive the remainder of us."
I thrust an arm through Grey's and led him off up the beach in the direction of the bay of the Spaniards.
"You're not trying to tell me that you believeany such hideous rot as that, are you?" I exploded, after we had left the camp well to the rear.
"God knows, I don't want to believe it, Preble; I pointedly don't believe the villainy charge. But the other hint—that Bonteck may be losing his grip on himself: we've all noticed it; you must have noticed it. And it is scaring the women no end. It is bad enough to have Ingerson around, licking his lips and wolfing every drop of liquor he can get his hands on; to have Barclay whining, and Miss Gilmore showing her claws, and the major grabbing for a little more than his share when he thinks nobody is looking. I have been trying hard to keep Annette from seeing and hearing. She has a perfectly childish horror of crazy people, Preble, and I—and we——" he broke down and choked over the thing that he was afraid to say, and I tightened my grip on his arm.
"Brace up!" I broke out harshly. "We don't have to say die until we're dead! You've got to brace up for Annette's sake. If she sees you crumbling it'll be all up with her—you know that much. Past that, you kill off this idiotic blether about Van Dyck every time you hear it. It's rot—the wildest tommyrot! Bonteck has his load to carry, and it's a good bit heavier than yours—or than mine, for that matter. He isn't losing his mind, and he hasn't been raiding the commissary. Say those two things over to yourself and to Annette until they sound real to you!"
Grey pulled his arm free, and I could fancy him swallowing hard once or twice.
"I want to be a man, in—in your sense of the word, Preble," he blurted out. "I used to be, I think, before—before Annette came and snuggleddown into the empty place in my heart and made me see that it was up to me to carry the full cup of her sweet life without spilling a drop of it. But now—now when I look into her eyes and see the awful thing lying at the back of them—the thing that she's trying every minute of the day to keep me from seeing——"
He got this far before he choked up again, and now I couldn't be savage with him—which was what he was most needing.
"I know," I said, with a far keener sympathy than he suspected, for I, too, was seeing things in a pair of slate-blue eyes—eyes that were braver than Annette Grey's. "But we mustn't let down, John; we can't let down, you and I. When the pinches come, it's the man's privilege to buck up and carry the double load. That is one of the things we were made for." Then I tried to turn him aside from the most intimate of the threatenings. "About this smoke trail that the children saw: could they really tell which way it was heading?"
He shook his head.
"I am afraid not. They didn't see the ship; only the smoke. It was just at dusk, you know, and they wouldn't have seen anything at all but for the sunset glow in the west. It was quite dark when they came running back to the camp, and they were both so excited they couldn't talk straight."
"But they did see a smoke?"
"I don't know. No doubt they thought they did. But we've all been straining our eyes and stirring up the little hope blazes until I think noneof us can be really certain of anything any more. I guess there wasn't any ship."
"We needn't be too sure of that," I qualified. "There was a ship of some sort on the southern offing no longer ago than last Friday." And I told him what Conetta and I had seen.
"And you never told us!" he said reproachfully.
"It was only a disappointment, as it turned out, and sharing disappointments doesn't make them any lighter. But you may tell Annette, if you think it will help."
"It will help; I'll go back to camp and do it now. Are you coming along?"
At first I thought I would. Then the remembrance of what Grey had told me—about Van Dyck's newest trouble—came to oppress me, asking for solitude and some better chance of clarifying itself.
"I think I'll stay here and smoke a pipe," I said; and so we parted.
The pipe smoking had progressed no farther than the lighting of the match when I saw some one coming along the beach. I thought it was Grey returning to say something that he had forgotten to say, but when Billy Grisdale's dog came to sniff in friendly fashion at me, I knew that the approaching figure must be Billy.
"Jack Grey told me where I'd be likely to find you," said the infant, coming up to cast himself down upon the sand at my side. "Don't happen to have another pinch of tobacco in your inside pocket, do you?"
I had, and when his need was supplied he rolled a cigarette in a bit of brown paper saved from someof the provision wrappings and lighted it at the glowing dottel of my pipe.
"Tough old world, isn't it?" he mourned, stretching himself out luxuriously with his hands locked under his head. "Edie and I thought we were sittin' on top of it when we saw that smoke trail just after sunset, but it was only a false alarm."
"You are sure you saw a smoke?"
"Oh, yes; there was no doubt about that. We could see it as long as we could see anything. But I guess we just joshed ourselves into thinking that it was coming our way." He sat up to nurse his knees and was silent for a little time. When he began again it was to say: "You know these seas better than any of us; is there any chance at all that we'll ever be taken off? . . . Lie down, Tige, old boy, and take it easy. There's nothing to bite in these diggings—more's the pity."
I answered Billy's question cheerfully as a duty incumbent upon me, and I fancied he took the forced optimism for exactly what it was worth. While I was expatiating upon the law of lucky chances, the bull pup was refusing to lie down and take it easy; he was standing stiffly with his crooked forelegs braced and his cropped ears cocked as if at the approach of an enemy.
"What is the matter with the dog, Billy?" I asked, and as I spoke, we both thought we saw the answer in the lagoon at our feet. A triangular black fin split the mirror-like surface for a brief instant, and a twist of some huge under-sea body turned the darkling water into lambent phosphorescent flames. It was not the first shark we had seen, but they seldom penetrated this far into the lagoon.
"Ah!" said Billy, stroking down the rising hackles on the dog's back, "there's a quick way out of it for you, little doggie, when the clock strikes thirteen. One jump, and you'll never know what hurt you. You won't jump, eh? You're foolish, in your brain, old boy. It'll be much easier than starving to death."
"Still in the doldrums, Billy?" I asked.
"Who wouldn't be? But I didn't chase out here to swap glooms with you, Uncle Dick. I wanted to ask you if you believe in this wild tale of the Spaniards' buried treasure."
"I'll believe anything that will help to pass the time," I replied evasively.
"Huh!" he said; "that is what you might call the retort meaningless. Supposing therewasa treasure, and supposing you should stumble across it: would it be yours?"
"Why not?"
"I didn't know. I was just asking for information. You wouldn't feel obliged to chop it up into eighteen separate pieces and pass it around—like a watermelon at a picnic?"
"Why should I?"
"Oh, just on general principles, I thought maybe; all for one and one for all, and that sort."
With the miraculous discovery of the day—and Madeleine's rights—fresh in mind, it seemed a moment in which to tread carefully.
"Finders are keepers, the world over, Billy," I said. "I am a poor man, and I should probably hog the treasure if I should find it."
"That's better," he returned. "We're all growing so desperately inhuman that a fellow can't tell where to draw the line any more. If I findthe Spaniards' gold, you needn't expect me to whack up with you. I'm going to put my feet in the trough and keep 'em there. Come on, old doggie; let's go and hunt us a hole to burrow in. There's another day coming, or if there isn't, we shan't have anything more to worry about."
He got up to go back to the camp, whistling to the dog as he moved off. For the second time the bull pup braced himself, showing his teeth and growling a bit, and this time there was no disturbance in the lagoon to account for it. But Billy whistled again and the dog started to follow his master, looking back from time to time, as if he went reluctantly; and once more I wondered what he saw or heard or smelled.
As it fell out, the answer to this wondering query did not keep me waiting. Billy Grisdale's shadowy figure had barely disappeared in the down-shore distance when another and much more substantial one broke out of the jungle just behind me, and I got upon my feet to find Ingerson confronting me.
"What's all this talk about things being buried?" he demanded morosely.
"Listening, were you?" said I, taking small pains to keep the contempt out of my voice.
He threw himself down on the sand and sat with his arms resting on his knees and his hands locked together.
"I'm in hell, Preble," he muttered. Then he unclasped his hands and held one of them up. "Look at that."
Dark as it was I could see the upheld hand shaking like a leaf in the wind.
"What is the matter with you?" I asked.
"You know well enough; I'm over the edge.Van Dyck's killing me by inches. He wants to kill me."
"Liquor, you mean?"
His answer was a groan. "I haven't had one good drink in three days—not enough to make one good drink. It's got me, Preble. I didn't know. I've always had it when I wanted it. If you've got a heart in you, you'll show me where he's hiding the stuff. I'll go mad if you don't."
I wanted to tell him that it would be small loss to the rest of us if he should, but I didn't. As a person who is strictly the architect of his own misery, a drink maniac may command little commiseration, but his sufferings are none the less real, for all that. Sitting there on the sands, with the fires of the drunkard's Gehenna burning inside of him, Ingerson was a pitiable object. Still, remembering some of the brutal things that had been charged up to his account, and not less the cold-blooded bargain he was seeking to drive with Holly Barclay, I didn't waste much sympathy upon him.
"It is a good time in which to show that you are a human being, and not a beast, Ingerson," I said. "Thus far, you've been merely a clog on the wheels, and the day is coming, if, indeed, it isn't already here, when those of us who are men will have to remember that there are nine helpless women on this island whose wants must be supplied before ours are."
He looked up at me. "You mean that the food's going—or gone?"
"Yes."
He was silent for a moment, and then he laughed. It was the cracked laugh of a man on the brink.
"Eighteen mouths to fill, and nothing to fill 'emwith. You've said it, Preble; I'm nothing but a dead weight in the boat—a bump on a log. I'll remove one of the hungry mouths," and before I had the slightest idea of what he meant, he sprang up and hurled himself into the lagoon.
Thinking that the plunge was only the mad impulse of a half-crazed drunkard denied, and hoping that a salt-water soaking would bring him to his senses, I made no move at first. But when I saw him deliberately wade out over his depth and strike out with strong swimming strokes for the reef over which the ground swell was breaking, I remembered the black fin Grisdale and I had seen and shouted a warning.
"Come back here, you fool!" I called. "There's a man-eater in there! Come back, I say!"
I don't suppose he heard me; if he did, he paid no attention. I confess, with decent shame, that I hesitated when it became evident that he meant to carry out his threat of effacing himself. His life was of little benefit, to himself or to others, and if he lived, it would only be to add the care of a madman to our other calamities. I have been glad a thousand times since that this was merely a passing thought. The real motivating impulse came from the sight of a V-shaped ripple racing diagonally across the lagoon to intercept the swimmer; a ripple plainly discernible on the starlit surface of the reef-bound inlet. It was the shark again.
What happened after that will remain a nightmare to me as long as memory serves. I was stripping my coat and kicking off my shoes when Van Dyck came bursting out of the wood behind me.
"Who is that out there?" he gasped.
"Ingerson—he's gone off his head!"
Without another word Van Dyck ran down to the shore and took the water in a clean dive. When he came up he was within arm's reach of the dipsomaniac. There was a fierce grapple and both men went under. My heart was in my mouth. I made sure the shark had taken one or the other of them. But the end was not yet. As I waded out armpit deep, splashing and making all the noise I could in the hope of scaring the great fish, two heads bobbed up a few yards away, and I saw that Bonteck had either choked or drowned the would-be suicide into submission and was swimming in with him.
A few quick strokes gave me my chance to help, and together we dragged Ingerson ashore. He was half-drowned and was otherwise little more than a bedraggled wreck of a man. While we were working over him, Van Dyck explained—briefly. Edith Van Tromp had told him that she had seen Ingerson creeping into the wood on all fours, with a knife in his hand, and he—Bonteck—had followed. All day he had been suspecting that Ingerson was on the edge of delirium.
"You'll have to give him some of the hair of the dog that bit him, or we'll have a frantic maniac in our midst," I said. "Is there any liquor left?"
"A little. Stay with him and I'll go and get it."
He was gone only a few minutes, and by the time he came back, Ingerson was able to sit up. We fed him brandy in small doses, and as the fiery stuff got in its work some degree of sanity returned. Apparently he knew quite well what he had tried to do, and was surlily regretful that the attempt had failed.
"You made a bonehead play, Van Dyck," heshivered. "I was trying to do a decent thing to wind up with, and you blocked it. You'd better have let me alone."
Van Dyck did not reply, and the drink maniac went on monotonously:
"I wanted to wind it up. Old John B.'s got me. I didn't believe it, but the last three days have shown me where I was heading in. As long as you can keep me half lit up . . . but you can't do that forever."
"No," said Bonteck gravely; "this is the last bottle."
Ingerson's head had fallen forward upon his breast.
"One more—little nip, and then—perhaps—I—can—go—to—sleep," he mumbled; and at this we gave him the sleeping potion and in another half-minute he was dead to the world.
Hard-hearted as it may seem, we made short work of disposing of him. We were a long quarter of a mile from the camp, and, short of carrying him, there was no way to get him there. So we merely dragged his limp and sodden bulk up to a little open space under the trees and left it.
"I'm beginning to think he was more than half right about the bonehead play," said Van Dyck sourly as he carefully hid the last of the brandy bottles. "It is only a question of a little time—and his swigging of the last thimbleful of the stuff—when we'll have to hog-tie him in self-defense. Let's do a sentry-go around to the far end of things. We may as well dry out tramping as any other way."
And it was not until he said this that I realized that we, too, were as sodden as the limp figure we had hauled up under the palms.
Walkingbriskly to give our soaked clothes a chance to drip and dry out a bit, Van Dyck and I passed around the bay of the ancient wreck and in due course of time came to the heel of the sandspit in which the island terminated eastward. Here we found our signal rag hanging motionless on its tree mast, but the fire at the foot of the tree had gone out, and as our matches were wet we could not rekindle it.
I proposed going back to camp for more matches, but Bonteck said no, that it was hardly worth while and, pointing to a hazy gray mist bank in the east which was slowly rising to blot out the stars in that quarter of the heavens, he added: "That cloud means weather; most likely the kind that would put the fire out if we should make one. If you're not too chilly, sit down and put your back to a tree. There's a thing that needs to be hammered out between us, Dick, before we get any farther along."
I found a place where the sand was dry and warm, and sat down, and he squatted beside me. I wanted to smoke, and was absent-minded enough to fill my pipe with damp tobacco before I remembered that there were no matches. As to the chilliness, even the wet clothes merely gave theeffect of a steam bath. Within the half-hour the night had grown oppressively hot and the dead air was like that of an oven.
"Go ahead with your hammering," I said, adding: "There are several little matters that need explaining—from my point of view."
"It's coming to you—and to the others," he returned promptly. "I've been standing it off from day to day, hoping that the explanations might be made after the fact, instead of in the thick of it. But I've about reached the end of my rope. Mrs. Van Tromp told me after dinner this evening that she could serve possibly half a dozen more meals for the eighteen of us."
"Six meals; two days. We should have gone on reduced rations long ago. We've been wasting like drunken sailors."
"I know it. But I kept putting that off, too. Hoping against hope, I guess you'd call it. You know what a scare it would have thrown into everybody if the food scarcity had been made public."
"Quite so. But the scare will have to come now, and the suddenness of it won't make it any lighter."
"That is one of the things that is grinding me, but only one. I've been carrying a pretty heavy back-load, Dick, and the time has come when I've got to shift some of it—if I'm to keep from going the way Ingerson did a little while ago. But first, a word about that treasure find we made a few hours back; you'll stand by me in that, won't you?"
"In the matter of convincing Madeleine of the justice of taking the treasure for her own? Certainly."
"Thanks. I thought I could count upon yourhelp there. It is a godsend to her, Dick. Don't you see that it is?"
"I see that it will enable her to pay her father out of his theft debt, and by that means to purchase her own freedom," I rejoined. Then I added: "But I can't surround the miraculous part of it, Bonteck. In fact, I'm afraid I shall have to see and handle the gold again before I can be sure I'm not dreaming—as Madeleine said we all three were. There are too many impossibilities."
He was silent for a full minute before he said: "Yes, there are impossibilities—a good few of them. And yet there are not so many as there appeared to be." Another pause, and then: "Dick, I've had the shock of my life."
"I can believe it," I said; "so had I. But just what do you mean?"
Once more he seemed to be trying to shape things in his mind so that they should issue in some sort of orderly array.
"I'll tell you presently: that is why I wanted to get you by yourself. But there is something else that has to be told first. As I say, I've put it off as long as I can. You will want to tie a stone around my neck and heave me into the sea when you've heard what I have to say, and I shan't blame you. As the thing has turned out, I'm a cold-blooded assassin—no less."
"Open confession is good for the soul," I commented, but even as I spoke, all the surmises and half-suspicions that had been troubling me for days and weeks came tumbling in to make a mental chaos where there should have been calm judgment and a fair weighing of motives.
"To begin at the beginning, then," he went ondoggedly. "So far as I knew at the time, there was no mutiny on board theAndromeda. It was a plant from start to finish. I had two objects in view. The first and craziest was the notion that I handed you that night at dinner in New Orleans—the notion of cutting out a little bunch of people from the world—my world—and making them pull off their masks. It was a barbarous idea; a crudely savage one, if you like; only I couldn't see that side of it. I meant to make it a sort of unexpected picnic, providing carefully against all of the real hardships, but at the same time letting the shock do what it might towards the unmasking."
"I am trying to give you what credit I can for the carefully planned ameliorations," I said. "But that doesn't excuse your appallingly selfish motive. Go on. It was all prearranged with Goff, I take it?"
"Thoughtfully prearranged. And the motive wasn't wholly selfish, as you will find out a little farther along. Goff was to steer for this island, the longitude and latitude of which, as I told you, I had obtained from the captain of the tramp steamer that rescued you and the other survivors of theMary Jane, and at the critical moment there was to be a fake mutiny and a real marooning. It was by my instructions that Goff didn't appear in the marooning mix-up. I wanted him to be able to show a clean bill of health when the play was over. He was to pick his men for the mutiny demonstration and the marooning job, leaving the marooned ones to infer that he, and the handful of Americans in the engine-room and fire-hold, had been overpowered."
Again I said, "Go on," and tried to hold judgmentin suspense until after the evidence should all be in.
"We were to be left here for three weeks, and at the end of that period the yacht was to come back and take us off; Goff with a sailor's yarn of how he had finally got the better of the rebellion and resumed his command."
"Good—excellent good!" I applauded cynically. "And the three weeks were up just an even fortnight ago yesterday."
"That is why I had to tell you!" he burst out. "It is killing me by inches, Dick! Something has gone wrong; something must have gone frightfully wrong. I was only stalling when I led you to believe that I didn't know Goff, personally; I do know him; I have known him for years, and I'd wager my life that he is as true as steel. I began to be scared when I found that the little black-eyed devil of an under-steward, Lequat, had been picked to play the part of the heavy villain. I couldn't imagine—I can't yet imagine—why Goff should have chosen him."
Again a silence came and sat between us. While Bonteck had been talking, the night had grown still hotter and more stifling. As yet, the stars were burning in a clear sky overhead, but there was a gray, shadowy blur in the east behind which a late moon was struggling to rise. The blur, cloud-bank or a gathering fog, had been growing and extending by almost imperceptible degrees as we sat staring afar at it. In any latitude it would have presaged a change of weather; in that of our island it might well be the forerunner of a tropical storm. Still, there was no breath of air stirring, and the surface of the inclosed lagoon was likethat of burnished metal. And the heat, as I have said, was terrific.
"You once told me a tale about a certain fabulous sum of money that had been shipped in theAndromeda," I said at length. "Was that another of your romantic little inventions?"
"No; I suppose I shall have to confess that part of it, as well," he returned, more than half shamefacedly, I thought. "You know the criminal trap Holly Barclay has set for himself by squandering young Vancourt's fortune, and how he was purposing to get out of the trap. It is precisely as I told you when we spoke of it before; he is ready to sell Madeleine to the highest bidder. That is a pretty brutal way to put it, but stripped of all the civilized masqueradings that is exactly what it amounts to. And he had already given the option to Hobart Ingerson; I know it—knew it before I left New York. Do you get that?"
"Yes."
"I nearly went wild trying to think up some scheme that would break the Ingerson combination and at the same time pass muster with Madeleine. She loves me, Dick; she has admitted it; and if this miserable money tangle were out of the way, she'd marry me. But she wouldn't let me buy her freedom; she said if she had to be sold like a slave on the auction block, it certainly wouldn't be to the man she loved. God bless her sweet soul! I don't blame her for that. Do you?"
"Not in the least. But you found a way to whip the devil round the stump?"