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.