WALKING briskly 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
the effect 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 your help 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 on doggedly. "So far as
I knew at the time, there was no mutiny on board the _Andromeda_. 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 the _Mary 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 judgment in 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 like that 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 the _Andromeda_," 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?"
"The maddest way you ever heard of--a perfectly idiotic way, you will
say; and this winter cruise in the yacht was the chief move in it. I
had to have Madeleine in the party, and, of course, I couldn't have
her without her father. Including him meant including Ingerson. It says
itself that Barclay, with the threat of a prison sentence hanging over
him, wouldn't be willing to lose sight of his one best bet."
"I know," I nodded; "know more than you think I do, perhaps. Get on
with your story."
"Reading a story is what put the notion into my head, in the beginning.
In an old book of the Elizabethan voyages and discoveries I came across
this tale of a burned galleon and a treasure that was never found. What
I wanted to do was to put enough money into Madeleine's hands--money
that she would believe was unquestionably her own--to square up her
father's crooked accounts. This 'Treasure Island' business seemed to
offer the means. About that time I ran across Captain Svenson, the
commander of your rescue ship, and besides giving me the latitude and
longitude of this island, he told me that he believed it to be the
'Lost Island' of the old English privateers, and the same which was
known later, in the buccaneers' time, as 'Pirates' Hope.' Also, he told
me that you had told him of the existence of the old wreck. Don't let
me bore you with too much detail."
"I am too greatly infuriated to be bored. What is the rest of it?"
"Mere romantic flubdub, you'll say. I bought from the subtreasury a
quarter of a million dollars in gold bars--and had a devil of a time
cooking up a reasonable excuse for the purchase, as you would imagine.
These bars I had remelted and cast into rough ingots of about forty
pounds each. As a matter of secrecy, and to make them easily portable,
each of the ingots was packed in a box by itself, the boxes were marked
'Ammunition,' and it was as ammunition that the stuff was secretly put
aboard the _Andromeda_ at her North River anchorage."
"Sure!" I derided. "When ostriches do a much less naïve thing we call
them silly birds. I'd be willing to bet largely that any number of New
York crooks knew what was in your cartridge boxes long before you ever
got them overside in the _Andromeda_. What next?"
"Next, I cleared the yacht for Havana, having first made arrangements
to have the winter-cruise party meet me in New Orleans some three weeks
later. I'll admit now that I was a bit shaky about some part of my
crew. I had told Goff that I didn't want too much intelligence aboard,
and after we put to sea it struck me that he had rather overdone the
thing. We had a few Provincetown Portuguese who were all right, but the
lot Goff picked up in New York--foreigners to a man--didn't look very
good to me; nothing especially desperate, you know, but with the gold
on board it seemed up to me to keep a weather eye open."
"Some glimmerings of common sense now and then: you're to be
congratulated," I said.
"Rub it in; I've got it coming to me. Holding that cautious notion in
mind, I made the southward voyage look as much like a pleasure jaunt
as possible, touching at Havana, again at Port au Prince, and a little
later at Kingston. From Jamaica we shot across to South American
waters, and at Curaçao I gave the bulk of the crew shore leave for
two days. Then, with the bunch stripped down to Goff, the engine-
and fire-room squads, and two or three of the Portuguese, we made a
fly-by-night run to this island. You've got my notion by this time,
haven't you?"
"Partly; but go on."
"We made land about two o'clock in the morning, rounded this point of
the island, and dropped anchor just off the inlet opening to Spaniards'
Bay. With all hands off duty for the night, Goff and I got the electric
launch overside and landed the gold--which was some job for just the
two of us; something over fifteen hundred pounds in the lot. But, as I
say, we got it ashore, lugged it piecemeal to the little inland glade,
and there, by the light of a ship's lantern, we buried it, taking the
precaution to mark the place with that chunk of coral."
"Um," said I. "So the chunk of coral was there, waiting for you, was
it? Didn't it occur to you then to wonder how it got there?"
"It didn't. I'll confess I was pretty well wrought up. A dark,
deep-laid plot--even one that you have framed up yourself--gets hold
of you at the climax, and all I thought of at the time was the need
for getting the job finished without letting anybody but Goff into the
secret of it."
"You had taken Goff into your confidence?"
"To some extent, of course; I had to. He knew we were burying a small
fortune, but he didn't know, and doesn't yet know, what my object was.
After we had buried the gold, we filled the boxes with sand so they
wouldn't advertise too plainly the fact that they'd been tampered with,
nailed them up, ferried them aboard, and stowed them in the forehold in
the place from which we had taken them."
I chuckled. The whole thing was so childishly romantic that it sounded
like a tale lifted bodily from the pages of a dime thriller. Moreover,
it was so absurdly out of character with the Van Dyck I knew, or
thought I had been knowing. Yet I fancy the wildly romantic vein lies
but shallowly buried even in the soberest of us; and in Bonteck's case
the incredulities were put out of court by the fact itself: he had
actually done the incredible thing.
"It is all plain enough now," I said; "all but the silly childishness
of the entire transaction. You were meaning to sow the seed by telling
the old Spanish galleon fairy tale to the assembled company, taking a
chance of inducing Madeleine to join in the treasure hunt--as you did
this afternoon, most successfully, as I must admit."
"Yes; but hold on. We buried the gold and marked the place with the
chunk of coral, as I have said; and that was the end of it until this
afternoon. For the past fortnight I've been manoeuvering to get you
and Madeleine together and away from the others, so that I could work
the rabbit's foot of the old galleon story upon her, with you for a
witness. When the chance came, it worked out just as I'd planned to
have it--up to a certain point. Madeleine saw the stone, and she is
persuaded she saw it first. We rolled it aside and dug the hole. It was
after we had got down about two feet that my shock came along and hit
me. I don't mind admitting that I nearly had a full-blown case of heart
failure. Dick, _my_ gold was gone!"
"Ha!" I exclaimed; "so that was what was the matter with you, was it?
What is the answer? Did Goff come back after you'd gone to bed on the
night of the funeral and disinter the corpse?"
Van Dyck shook his head. "He is one of the few men in this world whom I
would trust to the limit, Richard. I can't believe it of him."
"Yet the deductions point plainly in his direction," I ventured. "Your
gold is gone, you say, and he was the only person besides yourself
who knew where to look for it. Past that, the yacht is gone, and it
doesn't come back to take us off. How do you explain these two small
inconsequences?"
"I can't explain them. There is only one explanation that I can think
of--and that is merely a raw guess. There is a bare possibility that
the mutiny was real instead of a fake. Lequat's part in it makes it
look a bit that way. If you've got his identity right, I'm certain he
didn't ship with us at New York, and equally certain that I saw him on
shore in Havana. As you'd imagine, I've been trying mighty hard not
to accept that solution of the thing. If a bunch of real pirates have
captured the yacht, we stand a pretty poor chance of ever seeing it
again."
While he was speaking, the first few precursor whiffs of wind came out
of the rising cloud bank in the east. With the moon and a full half
of the stars blotted out, the darkness had increased until the only
thing visible to seaward was the white line of surf curling over the
outer reef. I wasn't accepting Bonteck's belief in Goff's impeccability
entirely at its face value. A quarter of a million dollars, in a form
that couldn't possibly be traced--namely, in unmarked gold bars--was a
pretty big temptation to any man.
"Are you quite sure that the gold we dug up wasn't your own hoard,
merely buried a bit deeper than you thought it was?" I asked.
"Altogether sure," was the prompt reply. "The bars are not quite the
same shape, and they are rougher and look immeasurably older. No;
unbelievable as it may seem, the hundred-millionth chance shook itself
out of the box at the first throw. It was the galleon's gold that we
found."
"But wait a minute," I said. "Were the two lots buried under the same
stone?"
"Why not?" he queried. "Why shouldn't they be? Goff and I found the
stone there and rolled it aside and dug a shallow hole under it. When
we were through, we rolled it back. If we had gone a little deeper
we would have found what we three found this afternoon. The one
unaccountable thing is the disappearance of my plant. It's gone; there
is no question about that."
"What do you care for a quarter of a million dollars, so long as
Madeleine has been put in the way of purchasing her freedom?" I mocked.
"I don't imagine you are going to quarrel with the sheerly miraculous
part of it. The thing that is worrying me most, just now, is the fear
that the miracle won't go on miracling. Madeleine's gold bars won't do
her much good if we've all got to stay on this cursed island and starve
to death. And that brings us down to the threadbare old seam again. You
say we have only six full meals left; if we all go on short commons at
once we may live a week longer before we have to fall back upon the
shell-fish and cocoanuts."
"Yes," he returned gloomily, "that is what it is coming to." Then:
"What ought I to do, Dick?--go and tell the others what I have told you
and let them burn me at the stake? It's about what I deserve."
His manner of saying this carried me swiftly back to an older time,
reincarnating for me the Bonteck Van Dyck who had been my college chum;
generous, large-hearted, always quick to admit himself in the wrong
when he was in the wrong. Even with the knowledge that Conetta must
suffer with the rest of us, I could not flay him as he deserved.
"You are not all bad, Bonteck," I remarked. "Billy Grisdale and Edie
owe you something, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not in your debt,
too. You had a purpose in including Conetta and her aunt, and Jerry
Dupuyster, didn't you?"
"Of course I had. It seemed a thousand pities that you and Conetta
couldn't get together on some sort of a living basis."
"It happens to be too late to do me any good; Dupuyster has already
asked her," I said. "Just the same, I'm grateful for the intention; so
grateful that I'm not going to be the one to tie you to the stake when
the others pass sentence upon you. But all this is dodging the main
question. What are we going to do? We men, or at least the six of us
who call ourselves men, can't stand by and let the other twelve simply
curl up and die when the food is gone."
"I haven't any plan," he replied. "As I said a while back, I've just
been hanging on and hoping against hope. There is still a chance, you
know. The yacht's engines may have broken down. Goff may have had to
put in somewhere--at some one of the European-owned islands--and is
having difficulty in getting permission to sail. That might easily
happen, since he is only a sailing-master and has no written authority
to show. Taking that view of it, any one of a dozen things might have
got in the way to keep him from reaching us at the appointed time."
"True enough. But that hope is based upon the supposition that
your original plan is still in the saddle. It ignores the other
alternative--that the mutiny may have been a real one. Also, it ignores
the disappearance of the quarter million--your quarter million--which,
taken by itself, has a pretty dubious look. I know you don't care
anything about the money part of it, now that Madeleine has been
provided for by a miracle; but the evanishment of your gold bars would
seem to have a very pointed bearing upon our present situation. I
can't take your trust in Goff at par. If he didn't come back here and
get that gold an hour or so after it was buried, he did the next best
thing--which was to come ashore and move the landmark."
"Yes; but, man alive! don't you see what that presupposes? You are
assuming that in moving the chunk of coral he placed it exactly over
the other mess of gold bars. I grant you that such a thing might
happen, but you know well enough that it wouldn't happen--that there
are a thousand chances to one against its happening."
I had to admit that my second hypothesis was too lame to have a leg
to stand on, though it was the more hopeful one of the two. If Goff
hadn't resurrected the lately buried quarter million--if he had only
moved the marking stone--with due and careful measurements so that he
could find the place again--there was some chance of his coming back
to the island--after we were all safely starved to death. But these
speculations weren't getting us anywhere, and I said so.
"We're talking in circles," I complained. "All the gold there is lying
under that nubbin of coral, added to the truck-load you've lost and
can't find, wouldn't buy a single meal for this crowd of ours after
the provisions are gone. Let's get to work and do something. There is
enough timber left in the wreck of the _Mary Jane_ to build a raft, and
we have an axe--if Jerry hasn't lost it while he was chopping firewood.
You have the latitude and longitude of this prison of ours. How far is
it to somewhere--anywhere?"
Van Dyck did not reply at once. The wind was coming in little catspaws
now, and the curious haze, which was by this time obscuring the entire
heavens, was shot through with a sort of ghostly half light that was
neither lightning nor a reflection from the darkling sea. When Van
Dyck spoke, it was not in answer to my question about the latitude and
longitude.
"Hurricane conditions, I should say; wouldn't you?" he said, getting
upon his feet. "If they are, we'd better be hiking back to the other
end of the island. Our camp is too near the beach to be safe, even if
the wind should come straight out of the east. What do you think about
it? You know more about tropical storms than I do."
I was about to reply that a man might live half a life-time in the
tropics and still have much to learn about weather conditions, when he
suddenly reached down and gripped my arm.
"Look!" he jerked out. "No, not there--right here--close in--just
outside of the reef!"
I looked and saw what he saw. A short quarter of a mile to the
southeastward, with no lights showing and with her slowly turning
engines making no sound that we could hear, a ship, ghostly white and
shadowy in the curious light, was creeping, phantom-like, toward the
south shore of the island. It was the _Andromeda_.