At the head of the file, Captain Tony advanced through the
clearing, and what with his flowing black beard, his portly form,
and a certain dramatic swagger which he possessed, he looked so
entirely Italian and operatic that you expected to hear him at any
moment burst out in a sonorous basso. With a sweeping gesture he
flung down upon the table two brown canvas bags, which opened and
discharged from gaping mouths a flood of golden coins.
His histrionic instinct equal to the high demands of the moment,
Captain Tony stood with folded arms and gazed upon us with a
haughty and exultant smile.
Slinker and the cross-eyed man shouted aloud. They ran and
clutched at the coins with a savage greed.
"Gold, gold--the real stuff! It's the doubloons all right--where's
the rest of 'em?" These cries broke from Slinker and Horny
confusedly as the gold slid jingling between their eager fingers.
"The rest of 'em is--where they is," pronounced Tony oracularly.
"Somewheres in the sand of the cave, of course. We'll dig 'em up
to-morrow morning.
"What was the point in not digging 'em all up while you was about
it?" demanded Slinker, lowering. "What was the good o' digging up
jest these here couple o' bag's and quitting?"
"Because we didn't dig 'em up," responded Tony darkly. "Because
these was all ready and waiting. Because all we had to do was to
say 'Thankee,' to the feller that handed 'em out."
"I say," interposed one of the party nervously, "what's the good of
that kind of talk? They ain't any sense in hunting trouble, that
ever I heard of!" He glanced over his shoulder uneasily.
The rest burst out in a guffaw.
"Chris is scared. He's been a-going along looking behind him ever
since. Chris will have bad dreams to-night--he'll yell if a owl
hoots." But I thought there was a false note in the laughter of
more than one.
"Oh, of course," remarked Slinker with indignant irony, "me and
Horny ain't interested in this at all. We jest stayed bumming
round camp here 'cause we was tired. When you're through with this
sort of bunk and feel like getting down to business, why jest
mention it, and maybe if we ain't got nothing better to do we'll
listen to you."
"I was jest telling you, wasn't I?" demanded Tony. "Only that fool
Chris had to butt in. We got these here bags of doubloons, as I
says, without havin' to dig for 'em--oncet we had found the cave,
which it's no thanks to old Washtubs we ain't looking for it yet.
We got these here bags right out of the fists of a skeleton. Most
of him was under a rock, which had fell from the roof and pinned
him down amidships. Must of squashed him like a beetle, I guess.
But he'd still kep' his hold on the bags." I turned aside, for
fear that any one should see how white I was. Much too white to be
accounted for even by this grisly story. To the rest, these poor
bones might indeed bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy
lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy. To me,
they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale
of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose
love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck
down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of
soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at
work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall--just then. Not
the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of
moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped for the last of
his brown bags--and then I rejected this, and knew that there was
nothing stupid or blind about it--and wondered whether it were
instead malicious, and whether all might have been well with Peter
if he had obeyed the voice that bade him leave the crucifix for
Bill--
Vaguely I heard around me a babble of exclamations and conjectures.
Murmurs of interest rose even from our captive band. Then came
Slinker's voice, loud with sudden fear:
"Say, you don't suppose the--the Bones would of got away with the
rest of the coin somehow, do you?" he demanded.
"Got away with it?" Tony contemptuously thrust aside the
possibility. "Got away with it how? He sure didn't leave the
island with it, did he? Would he of dug it up from one place jest
to bury it in another? Huh! Must of wanted to work if he did!
Now my notion is that this happened to one of the guys that was
burying the gold, and that the rest jest left him there for a sort
of scarecrow to keep other people out of the cave."
"But the gold?" protested Slinker. "They wouldn't leave that for a
scarecrow, would they?"
"Maybe not," admitted Tony, "but suppose that feller died awful
slow, and went on hollering and clutching at the bags? And they
couldn't of got that rock off'n him without a block and tackle, or
done much to make things easy for him if they had, him being jest a
smear, as you may say. Well, that cave wouldn't be a pleasant
place to stay in, would it? And no one would have the nerve to
snatch them bags away to bury 'em, 'cause a dying man, especially
when he dies hard, can have an awful grip. So what they done was
just to shovel the sand in on the gold they'd stowed away and light
out quick. And what we got to do to-morrow is to go there and dig
it up."
If the ingenuity of this reasoning was more remarkable than its
logic, the pirates were not the men to find fault with it. Indeed,
how many human hopes have been bolstered up with arguments no
sounder? Desire is the most eloquent of advocates, and the five
ruffians had only to listen to its voice to enjoy in anticipation
all the fruits of their iniquitous schemes. The sight of the
golden coins intoxicated them. They played with the doubloons like
children, jingling them in their calloused palms, guessing at
weight and value, calculating their equivalent in the joy of
living. Laughter and oaths resounded. Mr. Tubbs, with a somewhat
anxious air, endeavored to keep himself well to the fore, claiming
a share in the triumph with the rest. There was only the thinnest
veil of concealment over the pirates' mockery. "Old Washtubs" was
ironically encouraged in his role of boon companion. His air of
swaggering recklessness, of elderly dare-deviltry, provoked
uproarious amusement. When they sat down to supper Mr. Tubbs was
installed at the head of the table. They hailed him as the
discoverer who had made their fortunes. From their talk it was
clear that there had been much difficulty about finding the cave,
and that for a time Mr. Tubbs's position had been precarious.
Finally Captain Magnus had stumbled upon the entrance.
"Jest in time," as he grimly reminded Mr. Tubbs, "to save you a
header over the cliff."
"Ha, ha!" cackled Mr. Tubbs hysterically, "you boys will have your
little joke, eh? Knew well enough you couldn't get along without
the old man, didn't you? Knew you was goin' to need an old
financial head to square things in certain quarters--a head what
understands how to slip a little coin into the scales o' justice to
make 'em tilt the right way. Oh, you can't fool the old man, he,
he!"
While the marauders enjoyed their supper, the women prisoners were
bidden to "set down and stay sot," within sweep of Captain Tony's
eye. Mr. Shaw and Cuthbert Vane still held the position they had
occupied all afternoon, with their backs propped against a palm
tree. Occasionally they exchanged a whisper, but for the most part
were silent, their cork helmets jammed low over their watchful
eyes. I was deeply curious to know what Mr. Shaw had made of the
strange story of the skeleton in the cave. He could hardly have
accepted Captain Tony's explanation of it, which displayed, indeed,
an imperfect knowledge of the legend of the _Bonny Lass_. Might
not the Scotchman, by linking this extraordinary discovery with my
unexplained request of him this morning, have arrived already at
some glimmering of the truth? I hoped so, and longed to impart to
him my own sure knowledge that the confident expectations of the
freebooters for the morrow were doomed to disappointment. There
seemed a measure of comfort in this assurance, for our moment of
greatest peril well might be that in which the pirates, with the
gold in their possession and on the point of fleeing from the
island, recalled the respectable because so truthful maxim that
dead men tell no tales. Therefore in the postponement of the
crucial moment lay our best hope of rescue or escape.
On the other hand, I fancied them returning from the cave surly and
disappointed, ready to vent their wrath on us. All, except the
unspeakable Magnus, had shown so far a rough good nature, even
amusement at our plight, but you felt the snarl at the corner of
the grinning lips. You knew they would be undependable as savages
or vicious children, who find pleasure in inflicting pain. And
then there was always my own hideous danger as the favored of the
wolfish captain--
And I wondered, desperately, if I might buy safety for us all at
the price of the secret of the _Island Queen_, if a promise from
the five scoundrels around the table would have more meaning than
their wild boasts and shoutings now?
And now the night that I unutterably dreaded was upon us. But the
pirates still thought of nothing but the gold. They had exhausted
their own portable supplies of liquor, and were loud in their
denunciations of our bone-dry camp, as they termed it. Mr. Tubbs
enlarged upon the annoyance which Mr. Shaw's restrictions in this
matter had been to him, and regretted that he had long ago
exhausted the small amount of spirituous refreshment which he had
been able to smuggle in. Tony, however, was of another mind. "And
a good thing, too," he declared, "that you guys can't booze
yourselves blind before morning, or there wouldn't be much gold
took out of that there cave to-morrow. Once we make port
somewheres with that chest of treasure aboard you can pour down
enough to irrigate the Mojave Desert if you like."
It was Tony, too, who intercepted a tentative movement of Captain
Magnus in my direction, and ordered me into the cabin with my aunt
and Miss Browne. Through the walls of the hut we heard loud and
eager talk of the morrow and its certain golden harvest as the
pirates made their dispositions for the night. Then the voices
trailed off sleepily and silence succeeded, broken only by the
ceaseless murmur of the waves around the island.