  After a quick handclasp with the other two, Sam counseled delay. “Better to tell me what has happened to you,” he said. “There are men hiding on that ship, waiting till the men in the boat get all their dunnage on board——” “Dunnage!” interrupted Nicky. “Sam—it’s gold!” Sam’s eyes rolled with excitement. “They went and found it!” he gasped. “We did, and they took it away from us,” Tom explained. “Who’s hiding?” Cliff asked. Sam suggested that they had better tell him their story first, and he laid on the oars and listened as they gave him a brief history of their adventures. In his turn he told them his story. “When I got my head full of crazy scares,” he said, “I left you on Crocodile Key, and sailed for the open water. Later on a revenue cutter overhauled me. Mr. Neale was with the men.” “Then he was all right?” Nicky asked. “Yes,” Sam replied, “all right, and mad. When he found out what I’d went and done he gave me an awful talking to, and then they turned the cutter about and went back to look for you.” After that, Sam explained, his conscience bothered him, but he decided that the boys must be all right, and so held on his course toward Jamaica. But during the late afternoon clouds gathered, wind came up, rain squalls blew over and his work was cut out for him. “I judged it was a ‘judgment’ on me from On High,” Sam declared. “I had more’n I could do, handling the sails to get them down, and all I could do I couldn’t get them reefed quick enough——” “And you lost your boat?” broke in Nicky. “No, sar,” Sam replied. “Wait—let me tell you. I had to run before the wind and when daylight came and the wind dropped I was so wore out with a sight at the tiller that I just fell down and slept. I let the Treasure Belle drift.” When he had awakened, he went on, he did not know where he was, but from the direction in which the wind had blown, he guessed that he must be well into the Gulf of Mexico. He trimmed his sails and with the old, heavy-duty engine for a kicker, he set a course Eastward. It brought him, in time, within sight of what he discovered to be the lower end of the Ten Thousand Island archipelago, almost opposite to the wrecked Senorita. “I saw somebody making a signal with a flag, and the flag at the masthead was upside down—a sign of distress,” Sam pursued his story, “I ran close in and found out that the Senorita was a wreck.” “We were on it when it happened—but we told you. Go on,” said Tom. Sam finished quickly. “There was a colored cook, a Spaniard, a man named Tew, and some sailors and the engineer,” Sam concluded. “They offered me money to take them aboard the Treasure Belle. I did, but instead of going back around Cape Sable, they took me and tied me up and threw me in the little cabin. They talked about capturing a boat or something and the first thing I knew, they had passed the Libertad, here, and went on beyond during the night. That was at night—last night. They hauled the Treasure Belle out of sight between two islands, a little North of here. There they laid quiet all today. One man swam off from my sloop and came back and they all talked. Towards evening they started the engine, came down, hauled alongside and got on board the Libertad. They had untied me and told me to swim onto one of the islands and stay—or starve, for all they cared. Then they held guns on me until I swam to the Key. They said if I warned anybody I saw, they’d pepper me full of lead. So I hid, and when I saw two white men and a Negro rowing towards Libertad, I didn’t dare to say anything. But nothing happened to them, and when I saw your boat I guessed it was safe to hail, because the men on the Libertad must be hiding and couldn’t hurt me. And so I found you.” “And I’m glad of it,” said Tom. “I’m right sorry sars, for what I done, and I’ll try to make it up to you,” Sam said. “It’s all right,” Nicky stated. “We won’t hold it against you. But you didn’t say what happened to your sloop.” “They put two sailors into her and sailed her away down the coast,” Sam replied. “To tell somebody something about bringing up some cases or something like that. I couldn’t hear much. They talked about lots of things—Indians and sharks and—oh, lots!” “But why don’t we row to the Libertad?” demanded Nicky. As he spoke the reason became apparent. Jim, in the boat, handed up onto the deck to the white men the last bars of gold. “Come aboard,” was presumably his order; the chums and Sam were too far away to hear. They did see sudden flashes, hear a subdued commotion, hear splashes in the water. Guns were being fired, and people were shouting. Almost immediately, before the shots died down, in fact, they heard the roar of El Libertad’s motor, saw her swing to her anchor, and, as it lifted from the coral, turned in a wide sweep, while shots flashed their spurts of flame through the darkness from her stern. Then she swung onto a Northerly course and disappeared swiftly beyond an island at the Northern side of the channel. “They’ve shot those men who took our gold,” Nicky declared. “Sam, and Cliff, row there, quick! We ought to try to pick them up—maybe they’re badly hurt.” Sam and Tom dipped their oars with a will. Cliff having donned his clothes, of course, before he took the oars as they rowed out from the treasure islet, took the tender’s light tiller from the floor where it lay while they navigated the shoal water, shipped it and its attached rudder, and steered so that the rowers could put more force into their strokes and thus cover the water more quickly. They soon reached the spot, and saw several figures struggling with a third. Sam and Nicky hailed. An answer came, “Jim, here, was knocked overside when he tried to scramble onto our ship. Help us get him to shore. His head hit the coral, we think! They sank the rowboat.” They pulled close and with some difficulty the inert colored man was lifted over the gunwale and dropped into the tender’s bottom. Then Mr. Coleson, with a smarting flesh wound in his arm, and Ortiga, who was too busy expressing an unfavorable opinion of his renegade brother to examine his hurts, seemed to have escaped with a scratched hand. They began to row toward the island but Nicky made a suggestion. “Let’s pull for the wrecked Senorita,” he urged. “There’s most likely to be a medicine kit on board her, and food as well.” It took quite a while to get back down the shore line to the point almost opposite the Shark River where the Senorita had grounded; but when they got there Nicky’s prophecy proved to be correct and Senor Ortiga, when the surgical and medicinal appliances were brought, made an examination of Jim, and then dressed a rather bad scalp wound, bringing its edges together with surgical thread after washing it with antiseptics. Jim came to himself before the bandaging was completed. Though weak and a little bit uncertain in speech, he was in no way permanently injured in his brain. Rest would restore his usual vigor and help nature to heal his hurt. Weary and discouraged, because there was nothing to be done toward the recovery of their lost treasure, the chums, after a midnight meal, threw themselves onto bunks in the engine room, preferring these to more comfortable wall berths with the two white men who had done them so mean a turn. Sam elected to stay with his own companions, and Jim was put in the forecastle to be alone while he rested. “I certainly am grateful to you for saving us, just now,” said Mr. Coleson as they separated for the night. “After the way he acted, he ought to be,” Nicky confided to his comrades, when they were alone. They slept peacefully, thoroughly wearied by hard work and worn down by the nerve tension of the last few days. It was Sam who shook them awake. “That man, Coleson, wasn’t so grateful, after all,” he said when the chums had rubbed some sleep out of their eyes in the early dawn. “The tender is gone. The two white men—gone too!” “The ungrateful—” began Nicky. But what would calling names do for them? Certainly it wouldn’t help any. “We are not on an island, and we’ve got food,” Nicky observed, recovering his usual trust in the eventual justice of life. “But we are marooned! And yet—and yet, I’ll say it again—we’ll come out best in the long run. You wait and see!” |
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