CONETTA'S assertion, 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 legendary tale
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 looked to 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 in California 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, the _Mary Jane's_
survivors 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 you weren't. You see, I
can't forget that those others stayed here and starved--long ago, you
know--the crew of the _Santa Lucia_."
"You have been listening to Bonteck's ghost stories," I jested. "You
mustn't take them for matters of fact."
"But there _is_ a 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 palms were 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's _Pasha_, or it might have been
the _Swan_, out yonder on the other side of the reef, pouring hot shot
into the poor, old, stranded _Santa Lucia_ here 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 say this 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 the young 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 laugh out 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
had struck; 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.