ON THE WAY TO THE KEYS
The _Treasure Belle_, when they inspected her with Sam and Mr. Neale,
disappointed the chums. She lay, careening to one side, in a place on
the shore of a small ship basin. Her hull, originally painted white, was
a mixture of grays and browns, streaked and dirty. Her cabin, when they
crawled into it, was musty and cramped, up in the bow, with no head room
and with its bunks both narrow and uninviting.
“Quite a difference between her name and her looks,” smiled Clarence
Neale. Nicky nodded and Cliff, standing on deck, pointed toward a
cluster of boats moored in deeper water.
“Why can’t we charter a boat like that one?” said Cliff, indicating a
fairly trim looking cruising launch, about thirty feet long, with a
raised cabin whose windows had neat little drapings at each side, whose
paint showed little wear. Where the _Treasure Belle_ had no bright work,
her hardware being discolored and rusting, the other craft showed signs
of constant attention.
“That’s a private boat, and not for hire, sar,” explained Sam. “She
belong to a white man. He use her for run to Cuba. I hear it told he is
a politician of Cuba, and he stay here because he is not so well liked
in his island. But they say he run there by night for some reason and
keep that boat only for that.”
“Maybe he would charter her to us if he didn’t need her,” urged Nicky.
“She’d be a lot nicer.”
Sam, at Mr. Neale’s suggestion, took them to the office of the ship
basin owners but they got no encouragement. The _El Libertad_ was not
for hire or charter. He gave the party the address of her owner readily
enough but without enthusiasm.
When Mr. Neale returned from an interview with Senor Ortiga, he shook
his head.
“_El Libertad_ is not to be ours,” he said. “Senor Ortiga told me that
he is having the engine overhauled and is waiting for parts—even if he
would let us have her, which he did not seem inclined to do, it would be
a month before she would be ready, he said.”
“This _Treasure Belle_ look poorly,” Sam said. “But she is Bahama built,
sar, and she’s sturdy, and seaworthy.”
“She looks like a tub with a sail,” said Tom.
“Yes, sar, but she has very light draught,” Sam urged. “She can go in
channels between the cays, and if she get aground her hull is strong and
not easy to break. That _Libertad_ is very thin hulled, and draws eight
inches more water.”
“Well, we can’t have her, anyway,” Nicky decided. “We’ll have to make
the best of this one and let the name make up for the drawbacks.”
“My cousin own her,” Sam stated. “I have not told him why we charter
her, and for the cruise to get relics that I say we use her for, he let
her go very cheap, sar.”
They made the necessary arrangements with Sam’s cousin and work was
started on the sloop. She was close to thirty-two feet in length, wide
in her beam and squatty looking, but her engine, though a heavy duty
make and not very fast, was in perfect trim. Her canvas was also neat
and complete.
While the paint was scrubbed and the dirty interior of the cabin made
presentable and as comfortable as possible, Sam, who was a good sailor
and knew the sloop well, gave Nicky, Tom and Cliff many lessons in rope
splicing, handling the sails, and, without actual practice in steering
he explained the method of holding a small craft on her course. Sam was
the only addition to the party, as, with Mr. Neale, who was sufficiently
good at navigation to handle a small boat on the comparatively
landlocked course they would take, it was felt that the boys would make
a sufficient crew, standing watch-and-watch.
Few supplies were put aboard. They did not want people to suppose they
were going to be on a desolate series of coral reefs for their cruise;
to buy much food would arouse curiosity, because they could get fresh
supplies on any of the islands of the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands they
were hinting that they would visit.
On a bright, clear morning Cliff bade goodbye to his father, the others
shook hands with Mr. Gray, and with the _Treasure Belle’s_ engine
thudding away without a skip, they maneuvered the sloop out of the small
basin and laid a course for Cuba, steering for the Eastern end of the
island rather than to their true course toward the Western end, so as to
make it seem that they were bound toward the Eastern group of islands,
after touching on the large island for some work Mr. Neale pretended
must be done there to verify some reports of Carib relics to be found in
the jungles.
But by noon, with the jib and mainsail spread to the steady breeze, they
shifted the tiller and brought the _Treasure Belle_ around again on a
course that would enable them to round the Western nose of Cuba and then
sail Northeast to the coral islets which clustered in a long fringe
along the Florida Gulf coast, at its lower portion.
“Without a map we will have to take some chances,” Mr. Neale told Nicky,
Tom and Cliff. “But we can come pretty close to a guess at the point
where we must anchor.”
“Where our half of the map showed the crossmarked ‘reck,’” Nicky
asserted.
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Neale. “We will hunt for a spot where there could be a
set of conditions like those we know.”
“You mean that there must be needles of coral deep enough for a Spanish
galleon to have gone aground and broken up,” Cliff suggested. “Then two
islands with a channel deep enough between for a heavy boat to use.”
“Right,” nodded the captain of the vessel, for that post had been given
to their older comrade. The Mystery Boys had given Mr. Neale his
initiation into the secret gestures with which they could communicate
without letting outsiders guess that they were doing so.
“Then we will work in through the keys with the light-draft,
glass-bottomed boat we are towing,” the captain went on. “If we fail to
find islands in a formation like the Great Dipper, we can work North and
South alternately until we do.”
“And then, the treasure!” exulted Nicky.
“I’m not so sure,” Cliff said. “Centuries have passed since it was put
there. The map didn’t show whether the treasure was buried or not.”
“I don’t see how it could have been,” Tom declared. “That coral is too
hard to dig in. They’d have had to blast to get a place deep enough to
bury it. I imagine they just lowered the chests into the water, maybe in
a little cove or where there was a hole deep enough to conceal the
chests.”
“We will have to see,” Mr. Neale agreed. “First we must find our Great
Dipper.”
They made the end of Cuba without any difficulty, rounded it and set the
tiller for the new course, sailing more slowly as they lost the direct
force of the steady breeze and had to keep rather close-hauled. They did
not use the engine, preferring not to employ it any more than was
essential. It might help them off if they ran onto a reef, and they
proposed to save their supply of gasoline for such an emergency.
At last, under a glorious sunset, with its rose and coral, its great,
vivid bands of green and vivid gold lighting up a few fleecy clouds near
the horizon, they sighted the low, long cluster of islets.
Not a thing had occurred during the trip to cause uneasiness. Sam had
been both courteous and respectful, without being servile. Like most
Jamaica colored people he felt himself to be the equal of the race of
lighter color, as far as education and morality could be compared. In
the matter of his color of skin he felt, with justice, that the teaching
of the Bible, and of the United States Constitution, that all men are
equal, in the sense of all being created by the same Great Creator, was
a true teaching.
Being sensible boys, Nicky, Tom and Cliff made no distinction in the
matter of Sam’s color. As long as he preserved the same habits of
decency as they did, as long as he “acted white,” as Nicky put it, they
were too finely bred to treat him like an ignorant heathen, as so many
rather ignorant people do in their relations with men of dark, or yellow
skin. They looked at the intelligence and the inner man, and not alone
at the tint of the skin.
Sam felt the decent attitude and responded. He never tried to be above
his station but he acted as an equal wherever his education enabled him
to do so, and accepted gracefully the superiority of Mr. Neale’s
training, Nicky’s deftness with a fish spear, Nicky’s eyes having been
quickened and trained by archery and other sports. Tom’s superior speed
as a runner had been proved on the beach before they sailed, as had
Cliff’s supremacy in wrestling. But there was no color line drawn, and
that made the cruise more pleasanter.
“The Keys!” cried Nicky from the bow.
They all lined up around the mast, and, just before the twilight and its
afterglow left the long reach of islets looking like ghostly shapes on
the water, they cast anchor.