"I used to hear great stories about this region years ago," volunteered Brice as the launch danced over the transparent water past Ragged Keys and bore southward. "I heard them from a chap who used to winter hereabouts. It was he who first interested me in Florida. He says these keys and inlets and changing channels used to be the haunts of Spanish Main pirates."
"They were," said Milo. "The pirates knew these waters. The average merchant skipper didn't. They'd build signal flares on the keys to lure ships onto the rocks, and then loot them. At least that was the everyday (or everynight) amusement of their less venturesome members and their women and children. The more adventurous used to overhaul vessels skirting the coast to and from Cuba and Central America. They'd sally out from their hiding-places among the keys and lie in wait for the merchant-ships. If the prey was weak enough they'd board and ransack her and make her crew walk the plank,—(that's how Aaron Burr's beautiful daughter is supposed to have died on her way North, you know,)—and if the ship showed fight or seemed too tough a handful the pirates hit on a surer way of capture. They'd turn tail and run. The merchant ship would give chase, for there were fat rewards out for the capture of the sea rovers, you know. The pirates would head for some strip of water that seemed perfectly navigable. The ship would follow, and would pile up on a sunken reef that the pirates had just steered around."
"Clever work!"
"They were a thrifty and shrewd crowd those old-time black-flaggers. After they were wiped out the wreckers still reaped their fine harvest by signaling ships onto reefs at night. Their descendants live down among some of the keys still. We call them 'conchs,' around here. They're an illiterate, uncivilized, furtive, eccentric lot. And they pick up some sort of living off wrecked ships and off what cargo washes ashore from the wrecks. A missionary went down there and tried to convert them. He found the 'conch' children already had religion enough to pray every night. 'Lord, send a wreck!' The conchs gather a lot of plunder every year. They—"
"Do they sell it or claim salvage on it, or—?"
"Not they. That would call for too much brain and education and for mixing with civilization. They wear it, or put it to any crazy use they can think of. For instance fifty sewing-machines were in the cargo of a tramp steamer bound from Charleston to Brazil one winter. She ran ashore a few miles south of here. The conchs got busy with the plunder. The cargo was a veritable godsend to them. They used the sewing machines as anchors for their boats. Another time a box of shoes washed ashore. They were left-hand shoes, all of them. The right-hand box must have landed somewhere else. And a hundred conchs blossomed forth with brand new shoes. They could wear the left shoe, of course, with no special bother. And they slit down the vamp of the shoe they put on the right foot, so their toes could stick out and not be cramped. A good many people think they still lure ships ashore by flares. But the lighthouse service has pretty well put a stop to that."
"This chap I was speaking about,—the fellow who told me so much about this region," said Gavin, "told me there is supposed to be pirate gold buried in more than one of these keys."
"Rot!" snorted Milo with needless vehemence. "All poppycock! Look at it sanely for a minute, and you'll see that all the yarns of pirate gold-including Captain Kidd's—are rank idiocy. In the first place, the pirates never seized any such fabulous sums of money as they were credited with. The bullion ships always went under heavy man-o'-war escort. When pirates looted some fairly rich merchant ship there were dozens of men to divide the plunder among. And they sailed to the nearest safe port to blow it all on an orgy. Of course, once in a blue moon they buried or hid the valuables they got from one ship while they went after another. And if they chanced to sink or be captured and hanged during such a raid the treasure remained hidden. If they survived, they blew it. That's the one off-chance of there ever being any buried pirate treasure. And there would be precious little of it. at that. A few hundred dollars worth at most. No, Brice. this everlasting legend of buried treasure is fine in a sea-yarn. But in real life it's buncombe."
"But this same man told me there were stories of bullion ships and even more modern vessels carrying a money cargo that sank in these waters, during storms or from running into reefs," pursued Brice, with no great show of interest, as he leaned far overside for a second glimpse at a school of five-foot baracuda which lay basking on the snowy surface of the sand. two fathoms below the boat. "That, at least, sounds probable. doesn't it?"
"No," snapped Milo flushing angrily and his brow creasing, "it doesn't. These water are traversed every year by thousands of craft of all sizes. The water is crystal clear. Any wrecked ship could be seen at the bottom. Why, everybody has seen the hull of that old tramp steamer a few miles above here. It's in deep water, at that. What chance—?"