Chapter One.
The Murder!
The golden sun was plunging his magnificent head angrily into the sheen of the bronze Atlantic when Septimus Minor scaled the craggy path which leads from Crocusville to the towering cliff above.
The wind came and went in fitful gusts, which now and again carried Septimus off his feet, and sometimes lifted him a foot or two over the edge of the rugged cliff in time for another eddy to carry him back.
Nature this evening suited the gusty humour of Septimus Minor’s breast.
“The crisis of my life approaches!” he said to himself, as a magnificent wave from below leapt eight hundred feet in the air, and fell, drenching him from head to foot. “I am fifteen years old next week, and something here,”—here he laid his right hand on his left side—“tells me I am a man.”
As he spoke, another wave leapt skyward, and out of it emerged the form of a man.
“Yes!” cried Septimus. “Her father!”
Septimus was the youngest of seven children, most of whom were orphans. But we digress.
“Belay there—haul in your mainslacks, and splice your marline-spike. Where are you coming to?” cried Peeler, the coastguardsman—for such, we need hardly say, was the rank of the new arrival.
“How are you?” said Sep, in an off-hand way.
“Blooming,” said the not altogether refined Peeler.
A gust of wind lifted them both up the twenty remaining yards of the cliff, and left them standing on a sheltered crag at the extreme brink.
“Spin us a yarn,” said Sep.
The setting sun cast a lurid flash over the figures of that strangely assorted pair. The next moment it had set, and nothing was visible but the reflection of the end of Sep’s cigar in the glass eye of his interlocutor.
Septimus Minor had lived in Crocusville ever since he could remember, and the coastguardsman some years longer. Hence Sep’s request.
Mr Peeler was a fine specimen of his class. He wore a sou’wester and boots to match, and round his shoulders—
But why all this minute detail concerning one who is to disappear—if he had but known it!—before that howling night—
“Twas in ’52 she grounded,” said he, transferring something from his right cheek to his left. “Hang me on the Union Jack,” (that was a nautical expression by which Peeler added solemnity to his statement) “if there was not exactly one million Spanish doubloons on board.”
Sep whistled, but immediately checked himself, and sat down on the wind to hear the rest.
“Bust my buttons if mortal man knows where she lies!” continued Peeler, “save and except yours ’umbly. Stand by, my shaver, and cast your cock-eye on this bit of rag.”
And he produced from his pocket a greasy piece of parchment with a map upon it.
“There,” said he, laying his broad thumb on a red cross somewhere in the West Pacific, “there she lies—full of gold, my boy. Shiver my jury-masts if she don’t.”
The wind on which Sep was sitting lifted him to his feet, as he grasped the map and gazed with quivering excitement on the mysterious red mark.
He laughed sardonically, and the perspiration stood in beads on his brow. Then, pushing Peeler over the cliff, he put the map in his pocket, and walked on whistling in the night air to the cottage.