“Well,” said Nicky, enjoying their suspense, “I told them exactly what Captain Kidd was reported to have said—except for one word that I changed. It didn’t change the real meaning, but I had a sort of flash of something inside, whatever it was, and I thought maybe if I changed that one word I could fool them—lead them on a false scent, and still tell the truth.”
“What word was it you changed?” cried Tom, and Cliff echoed the question in slightly different words but with no less eagerness.
“Repeat the message!” demanded Nicky. Cliff spoke.
“‘At the end of the line, in the lowest part of——’”
“Wait,” commanded Nicky. “What did you say after ‘in’?”
“The lowest part,” replied Cliff.
“And what is ‘the lowest part’ of a dipper?”
Tom saw it first.
“The bottom!” he almost yelled.
“That’s it,” nodded Nicky. “The way I remembered it said ‘in the bottom of the dipper.’ So I changed the word to ‘lowest part’ so I could make it seem that the two islands at the lowest part of the sketch were the ones it meant.”
“Then it was easy to draw the lines,” Tom agreed. “Nicky—I’m ashamed of myself for being angry and for not trusting you!” He made the admission manfully, and extended his hand. “I ask your pardon!”
“You ought to!” declared Nicky, but he grinned to take the sting out of his words.
Cliff was not behind Tom by more than a sentence. He, too, told his chum how sorry he was that he did not trust him. Nicky was glad to grip hands with both and to forget their former distrust.
“I didn’t pretend to notice because I wanted you both to act as though you were mad at me. It would make them believe I was telling the truth, I thought,” he explained.
“Let’s row in and see what the real ‘in the bottom of the Dipper’ looks like,” he added. “I’m nearly wild to see the real treasure spot, even if we can’t locate anything there.”
But Cliff counseled caution.
“Those fellows aren’t quite out of sight yet,” he declared, “and they might be watching. If we pretend to row along the same way they are going, until it gets dark, they will believe we have given up too.”
“That’s good sense,” Tom agreed. “When it’s so dark they can’t see us, even if they come back, we can swing in and camp out on some island. Then, if they get soft-hearted and return to pick us up, they won’t suspect anything.”
This was agreed to and they rowed along easily for about an hour. There was no sign, strain their eyes as they might, that the Libertad was anywhere else than on the first leg of her journey to Jamaica, so they pulled to the shore of an islet that had a small grove of cocoanut or mangrove trees—it was too dark to know which—and, though their couch was not very dry and rather too full of matted roots for comfort, the expectation of the morning’s find, and their own athletic training, enabled them to make the best of what they had.
Sunrise found Nicky awake and alert. He shook his comrades.
“Up—up, daisy, the sun is in the sky!” he cried, “and we—we, daisy, for treasure we shall try!”
“That’s good sense but terrible poetry!” laughed Cliff.
“I don’t care,” Nicky replied, “Tom, cook up some ham, and a rasher of bacon, and about twenty eggs and some cocoa.”
“Where do you expect me to get them?” demanded his chum, laughing.
“Charge them!” Nicky exulted. “Charge them at the nearest store. Our credit ought to be good. By noon we’ll have gold enough to pay the National Debt!”
“Hooray!” responded Cliff, “gold—gold—gold!”
And by eight o’clock they were in the tender.
“Treasure bound!” Nicky grinned.
First of all, of course, it was necessary for Tom, Cliff and Nicky to discover the key islands which formed the Dipper. This was not easy, because the channels between the islets were, in many places, too shallow for even their light-draught boat to navigate.
They had no definite idea just where to locate the Dipper, except that the charts had shown it, and the white men had mentioned it as being about midway between the inner and the outer boundaries of the archipelago.
Many trials they made before they found a channel that ran far into the crowded outcroppings which showed above the shallow water.
Every time they would locate what seemed to be a straight and a deep waterway, it would shoal up at one end and they would have to make a detour, sometimes of several islands, to find water they could use.
“I declare!” said Nicky, “it makes me think of a day my New York cousins took me for an automobile ride on Long Island. They were repairing roads, and every fork or crossroad we came to, it seemed, they had a sign, ‘Detour!’”
“And now we ‘detour!’ again,” laughed Cliff, piloting from the bow, “to the left, this time, Tom—Nicky—easy!”
They turned into a new channel, and so, time after time, even retracing their course occasionally to get back to deeper water, they made slow progress.
No delay daunted them; no shoal “made their pluck run aground,” as Nicky explained it. To the continual detouring was added the handicap of the difficulty they had in recognizing what would look like the Dipper constellation from above. “If we had an airplane, now,” Tom argued, “we could spy it in a second.”
“Right, again—pull slowly,” Cliff cut in; and so the morning wore on and they began to feel as though they had rowed half way around most of the archipelago.
But the longest way ’round is said to be the shortest way through, and the chums found it so.
“Look!” exclaimed Cliff, from the bow, “back water, fellows! And look ahead. I believe we’ve found it!” Tom and Nicky swung on the seat and stared over their shoulders. Hard as it was to be sure, because other islands, a little closer or further away complicated the general pattern, they felt that, at last, they saw the Dipper.
“But there’s an island almost in line with two of the lower ones that wasn’t on the map,” objected Tom.
“That’s so,” said Cliff, ruefully.
“Anyway, here’s a good channel, and we’re going South again—back toward where we started,” Nicky argued. “Let’s——”
“Back water! Back water!” ordered Cliff. But they had given a swift impetus to the small craft as Nicky and Tom bent to the oars and with a dull grating sound the bow up-ended a little, as it ran onto a shelf of the bedrock limestone, into which the coral formed itself.
Tom and Nicky narrowly escaped toppling over backward and Cliff saved himself from a plunge onto the shoal only by gripping the thwart with both hands as the boat stopped sharply.
“Well—here we are!” said Nicky, settling himself. “Come aft, Cliff, so we can lighten her bow and maybe we can pole off and back out—it’s too narrow a channel to turn around in!”
Cliff stood up to do as his chum counseled; but he remained standing, his eyes fixed, his body becoming tense.
“What’s the matter?” cried Nicky. “See anything?” asked Tom.
Cliff lifted a hand, pointing dramatically.
“Come here Nicky—Tom!” he urged. “Easy, so as not to tip the boat! Do you know what? That is the Dipper, and we have run aground right where the line would show we ought to stop in the chart—and yonder is ‘the bottom of the Dipper!’”
Excitedly his fellows scrambled over the intervening seat and crouched at his side.
“That’s right, I do believe!” agreed Nicky. “The reason the line stopped is because the channel stopped. This is where they must have come to a standstill in the old boat—those castaways!”
“Yes,” added Cliff, “they couldn’t go any further. And the bottom is level here. We could climb out and walk along it.”
“It’s just the place to unload chests of treasure,” Tom agreed. “If only there was some place to hide it in——”
“What about that?” cried Nicky, pointing straight ahead. “There on that islet that’s really at the bottom of the Dipper.”
“But it said ‘in’ not ‘at’ the bottom of the Dipper,” reminded Tom. Nicky nodded, scrambling out into the shallow water. Cliff followed, and Tom delayed only long enough to draw the nose of their tender far enough onto the shelf of limestone to prevent any chance of a slight current drifting it out of easy reach while they walked along carefully on the coral bed, avoiding jutting prongs and dodging the menacing little spaces into which a foot could slip so as to twist an ankle.
“We’re in the bottom of the Dipper, at least,” Cliff declared after a few minutes of cautious wading.
“I don’t see anything to write home about,” Tom said morosely, wincing from the pain of a slightly twisted foot. “All our trouble—for what?”
“Stand here a minute,” urged Nicky. “Let’s think. Now, fellows, you know that the treasure wasn’t buried yesterday. Maybe the whole top of the archipelago has changed since the castaways’ day. But this looks like the place they told Captain Kidd about, and unless some one else has taken it away, their treasure ought to be here, if we just know how to locate it!”
“That’s the trouble,” said Cliff, “how?”
“It’s no use,” called Tom, who had moved a little beyond his two companions, at the side of the tiny islet. “Some one has been here already!”
They moved up to his position and observed with dejected eyes the signs of a previous visit by others; roots were chopped in half; the signs were very fresh. At one place, very close to the edge of the small, root-matted surface, a hole had been chopped completely through the mass. Further into the brush there were signs of another such spot.
“That settles it,” Cliff grumbled. “Some one has beaten us.”
“Look out, Cliff,” cried Nicky, just behind his friend. “Don’t step back. Here’s another channel—right at the bottom of the Dipper part—it runs along what is the bottom, between the islands.”
“It’s only a hole, maybe——”
“No, it’s a channel,” persisted Nicky. “See—yonder, the color of the water looks different from the shoals. It runs——”
“It only goes to the lower island,” declared Tom, studying the water, and gently lowering himself, testing till his foot found the bottom. “It’s only about three feet deep, and—” he waded carefully away, and then returned. “It stops just by the other island, the South one. But there’s another channel beyond a reef there.”
“Then whoever came here didn’t use a boat,” Nicky suggested. “My guess is that those men waded up to here yesterday, and dug or chopped until they were sure they couldn’t find anything.”
“How do you know they didn’t come from where our boat is?”
“Because,” Nicky explained, “the chopped places are all on the outside part, nearest the gully—it isn’t really a boat channel, it’s only a gully.”
“Well, that doesn’t help us any,” Tom was still dejected and the more so because of his slightly injured foot. “I move we give up.”
But Nicky had climbed up onto the low, small islet, and, his body sprawled over the rooted, matted growth, was poking and probing.
“Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I guess we might as well. If there is any treasure, it’s too well hidden to discover. I say we might as well wade back to the boat and get some lunch.”
“Then we had better find our way out before dark—it took all morning to get in here,” Cliff suggested. Nicky, as nearly erect as the small, tough roots under foot would make it safe to be, began to push and work his way straight across the islet. Only his head and shoulders appeared above the low, young growths.
“I hate to give up,” he said, as his comrades started to pick their way back along the bed of the reef. “This island may not have been here at all when the—” His words ceased. There came a crackling and rending of wood. Nicky cried out!
Cliff, turning, saw Nicky disappearing!
Forgetting his ankle, with a cry, Tom, who also swung about, scrambled and plunged toward Nicky.
The latter was almost out of sight, near the edge of the islet, prevented from going lower by two roots, over which he had with quick presence of mind flung his arms.
“I—I fell—through!” he gasped as his chums made their way to the edge of the islet. “It’s a hole under the roots! Be careful, fellows, don’t slip or break through; the coral may be thin over it. It may spread further around than you think!”
With all the caution that their fear for Nicky permitted his comrades got close. The reef held.
“Listen,” cried Nicky, breathlessly, “I’m not hurt. Fellows—” He made a beckoning motion with his head, “I’ve—we’ve—found it!”
“The treasure?”
“The treasure! I’m sure of it. I fell through—and I can just touch something—like bricks—with my shoes!”
They had to go around the islet and approach Nicky from behind. The surface of the thin coating of land, held up and bound together only by its interwoven roots, was shaky enough, but they did not break through, and finally, by dint of much tugging, heaving and puffing, they drew Nicky back far enough so that he could scramble free and sprawl, gasping, half-laughing, on the surface by the jagged hole he had just left. Cautiously Cliff protruded his head.
“I see something!” he whispered, as if some one might hear——
“The island wasn’t as big or as high,” Tom said, peering too, “when the castaways brought the chests here. They buried them—they must have used picks to break a place in the coral.”
“Then they must have covered it over with boards and pulled the roots and earth over it—or else the wind and the birds have brought seeds and the islet has grown over the place,” Nicky added. “The boards were so rotted and the roots were so weak that my weight broke through!”
Like three active puppies digging a hole for bones, the chums pushed and scraped, tugged and tore at the roots; the weaker ones gave way and soon they had quite a goodly sized opening uncovered.
“There’s something down there!” gasped Cliff. “Gold bars, maybe! The chests must have been thrown away.”
“Now the puzzle is—how can we get close enough to tell?” Nicky said, in an eager voice; he was none the worse for his experience.
“Could one of us make a dive?” Tom speculated. All three were on their knees, heedless of the sharp coral bits, peering intently through limpid water into a mysteriously dark depression.
“I could almost touch bottom; where I was,” Nicky exclaimed. “Tom, you hold one arm, Cliff, you brace and hold the other. I’ll let myself down——”
“Don’t bother,” came a sharp voice, unexpectedly, from behind them.
They looked up, startled, dismayed. Quickly their eyes took in the scene. Just back of their own tender lay the boat of El Libertad. Quietly it must have been sculled up, while their attention was focused on Nicky and his find. Close behind them, smiling in a half sneering way, was Mr. Coleson, with Senor Ortiga beside him.
“We thought you might have misled us,” Mr. Coleson said. “We took the logical step to give you a free hand, and here you have exercised it—for which we are very—very grateful.”
“As for the treasure,” added Senor Ortiga, “never mind diving for it. Here comes Jim.”
“No, never mind,” added Mr. Coleson. “We will attend to it!”
“What are we going to do about these lads?” asked Mr. Coleson as the colored man, Jim, went back to the boat for several spades and an axe.
“They will help—won’t you?” said Senor Ortiga with a pleasant look that surprised the chums. “Just because they fibbed to us we can’t tie them up again! It was perfectly natural for them to want all the treasure for themselves. We felt the same way!”
“So we did,” replied Mr. Coleson. “After we roped them up for a whole day I can’t say that I blame them. Very well. Here is Jim. Let us clear away the roots and see what we have.”
Under the changed attitude of the white men, Nicky, Tom and Cliff fell to with a will. The axe helped, the spades were very useful; eager hands made the work seem a delight. After all, there would be probably be plenty of gold—or whatever it might be—for each to have a good share.
When they had cleared away a good portion of the earth and the matted undergrowth clinging to the crumbly soil, they saw, as soon as the mud they had created was settled, a fairly wide, and not very deep fissure in the coral beneath.
Probably, they decided, the castaways, in the days they had been there, had taken advantage of a naturally formed depression in the limestone formation, perhaps had widened it somewhat with picks.
At any rate, when the moiled water had cleared, they beheld a mass of metallic bars, thrown in, helter-skelter.
Mr. Coleson, being the tallest, lowered himself onto the top of the mass and found that his chin was just above water. By taking a deep breath, holding it, and plunging, naked as he was, beneath the surface, he could get down, for a brief time to the hoard of metal.
After his first plunge he came up, and sputtering till he rid his nostrils of water, he held up above the water a bar, which Senor Ortiga almost snatched from him in his excitement.
They all crowded around to look.
Ortiga scraped the dirt and slime, accumulated partly from their recent digging, from the bar and gave an exultant cry.
One and all they echoed it.
“Gold—gold—gold!” shrilled Nicky.
Down again plunged Mr. Coleson, to emerge above the surface with a second bar which was eagerly grasped by Tom. It weighed, he guessed, about ten pounds, and was, when examined, what appeared to be pure gold of very fine quality, not very large, for gold is heavy metal.
“The Spaniards used to melt down the Inca images and ornaments,” Cliff recalled. “Then they would ship them to Spain in galleons. There must be a lot of this gold—isn’t there, Mr. Coleson?”
“Yes—a lot!” he answered.
All resentment vanished from the hearts of these strangely united enemies under the impulse of a common gold madness. Mr. Coleson dived under, several times, bringing up bars similar to those already found. Then it was decided that they had better take what they had, go to the Libertad, and wait till daylight for full boatloads.
“People have been lost in these islands—among the twisting, blind channels,” observed Mr. Coleson. “We laid down markers on the islands as we came in, each time, and we had better row out before it gets too dark to see them.”
So they all returned to El Libertad and spent an excited evening, hardly daring to sleep for fear they would wake up to discover that their treasure was only dream-gold. But it was solid, in the morning light, gleaming with its yellow luster when they scraped the surface. They had found a treasure for which men might easily struggle and battle, kill and be killed.
The next few days were full of hard work; nevertheless, it was work that brought no complaints.
The recovery of the golden bars was necessarily somewhat slow because only one man could work in the pit at a time. Mr. Coleson, Jim and Senor Ortiga took turns, but most of the diving fell to Mr. Coleson, for as they brought up more bars the level of the bottom fell lower by their removal, and the shorter people were totally under water when they tried to secure the bars, and had to dive, grab a bar, thrust themselves upward and be caught by those who waited.
But, one late afternoon they had exhausted the contents of the hole as far as gold was concerned. There were several large objects, presumably golden placques or perhaps they were silver; but they were too heavy to be dislodged, much less to be lifted to the surface.
All of the company agreed that it was hardly worth while to try for them any longer, and the white men, with Jim, began to pick their way over to the two boats, both filled with their last load of wealth. But Nicky motioned to his chums to delay for a moment.
“Mr. Coleson had a despatch box of some kind almost at the surface, just a little while ago,” he told them. “Let’s make a try to get it again. He dropped it because he said it probably contained only papers.”
“What do we want with papers?” argued Tom. “We can come back some time and get it.”
“It may have the log of the old ship in it, or papers about the cruise,” Nicky argued. “Cliff’s father would like them more, I think, than the gold. He could write a whole history about the Spanish times in America from them, maybe.”
Cliff, being the oldest and strongest, decided to do the diving. Divesting himself of clothing which he hung on the remaining bushes on the rim of the islet they had not disturbed, he plunged.
On his first rise he clutched an ancient ornament, something like part of a figure of a god, but it was of some stone, not of gold; he was about to throw it aside but Nicky took it. “It might be a relic, like those we found in the Carib diggings,” he suggested.
Cliff made several tries, and finally brought up an old, and very much rusted bronze box, of very curious workmanship, with a handle at each end. It was badly eaten away by oxide and Cliff urged Tom, who took it, to handle it with care. Then Cliff was helped up onto the water-covered bedrock and reached for his clothes.
“Why—” Nicky, turning toward the boats, gasped. “What are they doing?”
“They’re putting gold from our boat into theirs!”
As Tom made the exclamation he started toward the distant boats; the two white men and the colored Jim were loading up their boat.
“What are you doing that for?” cried Tom.
He, as well as his slightly injured foot would allow, hastened over the coral. Cliff, his clothes carried in a rough, quickly snatched bundle, ran too. Nicky scrambled ahead of him.
But before they could get to the boats they saw Jim take the oars out of their boat, climb into his own, and thrust it rapidly backward—there was no depth to turn it around—down the channel.
“We’ll leave these oars on the island at the bend,” called Senor Ortiga. “We don’t want to leave you here to starve. Swim down or push your boat ahead of you and swim till you get the oars; then follow the markers; we’ll leave them, too. We don’t want to desert you, but we must. By the time you get out we can be safely away!”
Nicky and Cliff fought their way over the coral as fast as they could, stumbling into crevasses, almost falling as their incautious feet struck rises; but they saw that it was wasted effort.
They returned, to assist Tom.
Once the three were in their boat, far down the channel they saw the other boat turn and disappear around a bend.
“It will be dark, before we get there,” cried Tom, and he began to shudder and to forecast dire difficulties, but Cliff bade him, rather sharply, to stop.
“Remember what the teacher said, last term, about being afraid?” Nicky reminded Tom. “He said that when we became afraid we deadened our common sense and made pictures of dangers that wouldn’t exist at all unless we thought they did. He said it wasn’t what was dangerous that hurts us, but what we thought might happen. So—Tom—snap out of it!” He spoke rather curtly and slangily, to impress Tom the more quickly. Tom saw the sense in the rebuke and reminder and grinned sheepishly.
Meanwhile, a hand on the stern thwart, Cliff was thrusting with his feet, swimming, and pushing the boat ahead at a slow rate.
They finally reached the distant island and found the oars.
“Had we better stay here till daylight?” questioned Cliff.
“No,” Nicky declared. “They have our gold, and they mustn’t get away. They have a heavy load and they may get stuck in the channel for their greediness. We can see the papers they stuck on sticks to mark the channel. Let’s get on as far as we can.”
Tom agreed with him, not especially caring to stay amid the spooky, silent islets all night.
They had hard work in the swiftly closing darkness, but by using their eyes sharply and by going ahead slowly, as their escaping enemies must also do, they finally saw clear water ahead.
“Hooray!” cried Nicky. “I think I see them still in the rowboat! Pull hard, Cliff and Tom, we can get there before they get away!”
But as he said it there came a hail, sharp and eager from the shore of the island at the mouth of the channel.
“Help! Help!”
Tom and Cliff held their oars, surprised, listening.
“Boat ahoy! Help!”
“Somebody’s on that island!” Nicky declared. Mechanically responding to a call for aid, Tom and Cliff swung the tender’s nose toward the island. Their way took them very close.
“Boys—Master Cliff—Master Tom—Master Nicky! It’s Sam!”
The figure they could discern against the trees waved its arms.
“Quick, pull in close,” cried the tall figure, wading into the water to meet them. “My boat’s gone. Take me in. We can git to the other boat before they get away! Hurry, please, sars!”
It was only an instant before he had caught the approaching gunwale and was tumbling in. “Now,” he cried, “give way, sars!”
“Sam!” cried Nicky, at the bow, pumping the black hand. “I never was so glad to see anybody in my life. Grab those oars! We’ll get them yet!”
But they were fated to act otherwise.
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!”
To say that Clarence Neale, the leader at the start of the Mystery Boys’ adventure, was worried would be a tame statement of the truth. Clarence Neale was more than that. He felt that without intending to do so he had shirked a responsibility.
Mr. Gray, the scholar and writer, had entrusted Cliff to his care on an adventure that promised to be merely a cruise; Nicky Lane, and Tom, had come under his protection without permission from their relatives; and not one of them was with him, nor was their whereabouts known to him.
No wonder the young archaeologist, himself not too far from boyhood to recall what dangers its headstrong impulses lead to, dreaded many dire things.
Two things he knew definitely. The boys were not on Crocodile Key, nor did any boatman or native in Little Card Sound or on its shores know a thing about them. The second point he was sure about was that they were not on Sam’s sloop. He had overhauled that in the government cutter and made sure.
Where were they?
A lieutenant in charge of the patrol had set him ashore where a government sub-station of the patrol service enabled him to use the telephone, to communicate with other stations. Not a sign of the boys resulted from his several calls.
“No word?” asked the young lieutenant later in the afternoon.
Mr. Neale shook his head dejectedly, climbing aboard the cutter.
“I can’t see anything to explain it except that the lads must have gone inland, and become lost,” he asserted. Lieutenant Sommerlee discounted such a suggestion. The outcrop of coral on which they landed while he went to interview Nelse and Pompey, was cut off by water too deep to wade; they would hardly dare swim to the further shore; it was swampy as could be seen from Crocodile Key if they took pains to look, he declared.
“I suggest that you come aboard again,” Lieutenant Sommerlee invited, holding to his own idea, without stating it, that the boys had been taken off the key by some fisherman. “I have word that a band of hi-jackers is somewhere around and I have to watch for them; we can easily hail the different natives as we pass up and down the coast and see which one rescued the boys.”
Clarence Neale accepted the invitation and was on board the cutter when, that night, she pursued, and lost touch with, the Senorita.
It was Lieutenant Sommerlee’s notion that the Senorita, if it was she, had turned tail and run for her home port in Cuba. He was ready to give up the search for her, and the more so because of a growing intensity of interest in the boys.
Naturally, not knowing they were on the Senorita, or that she had gone into the archipelago, neither Mr. Neale nor the lieutenant thought of such a thing as looking for the adventuresome trio in those waters. It seemed almost certain that they must have hailed some small boat, and on being taken aboard, had found no means of communicating their plight, or of getting back.
But as day followed day, the idea had to be given up. There was no spot that the cutter had not touched, where the boys could possibly be. Unless they had been taken off on a coasting sloop—but none had been seen in Little Card Sound, nor would it have excuse for being there. Of course the few who knew the truth about the Senorita and her hiding place on the day that the boys had been missed, kept their mouths tightly closed.
“I cannot imagine what has become of them,” Mr. Neale said, with anxiety in his voice and deep wrinkles of worry on his forehead.
“Oh, they’ll turn up, as boys do, and usually safe and sound,” the lieutenant said.
One of their men sighted a sail and gave her position. Lieutenant Sommerlee gave orders; the helm was shifted and a course was laid to intercept the vessel, not because the boys might be on it, but to hail it and see if any news had been picked up somewhere.
As they came within better sighting distance, Lieutenant Sommerlee handed Mr. Neale his binoculars.
“Didn’t you say Sam’s sloop we overhauled was going back to Jamaica?” he asked. Clarence Neale nodded. “I told Sam he was discharged, as far as our party was concerned,” he acknowledged.
“Look!” ordered the lieutenant. Mr. Neale lifted and focused the glasses.
“Great—guns!” he cried. “That’s the Treasure Belle, now, as sure as I live!”
They lost no time in laying alongside and hailing.
But Sam did not answer. Instead one of two men spoke through the deepening twilight.