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.