"Nonsense!" I hastily interposed. "My finding the diary was just an accident; I'll take a share of it—no more."
Here Miss Browne murmured something half inaudible about "—confined to members of the Expedition—" but subsided for lack of encouragement.
"I suggest," said Dugald, "that our numbers having most fortunately diminished and there being, on the basis of Peter's calculations, enough to enrich us all, that we should share and share alike." And this proposal was received with acclamations, as was a second from the same source, devoting a certain percentage of each share to Cookie, to whom the news of his good fortune was to come later as a great surprise.
As an earnest of our riches, we had the two bags of doubloons which the pirates had recovered from the fleshless fingers of the dead man. They were old worn coins, most of them, many dating from the seventeenth century, and bearing the effigies of successive kings of Spain. Each disk of rich, yellow Peruvian gold, dug from the earth by wretched sweating slaves and bearing the name of a narrow rigid tyrant, had a history, doubtless, more wild and bloody than even that we knew. The merchant of Lima and his servant, Bill Halliwell, and afterward poor Peter had died for them. For their sake we had been captives in fear of death, and for their sake now four wretched beings were prisoners in the treasure-cave and two more cursed, fate and their bonds within hearing of our outraged ears. And who knew how much more of crime and blood and violence we should send forth into the world with the long-buried treasure? Who knew—and, ah, me, who cared? So riotous was the gold-lust in my veins that I think if I had known the chest to be another Pandora's box I should still have cried out to open it.
Shortly before sundown Cuthbert and Cookie were despatched by Dugald Shaw to the cliff above the cave with supplies for the inhumed pirates. These were let down by rope. A note was brought up on the rope, signed by Mr. Tubbs, and containing strangely jumbled exhortations, prayers and threats. A second descent of the rope elicited another missive, neatly folded and addressed in the same hand to Miss Jane Harding. Cuthbert gave this privately to me, but its contents must forever be unknown, for it went, unread, into Cookie's fire. I had no mind to find Aunt Jane, with her umbrella as a parachute, vanishing over the cliffs to seek the arms of a repentant Tubbs.
The fly in the ointment of our satisfaction, and the one remaining obstacle to our possession of the treasure, was the presence of the two pirates in our midst. They were not nice pirates. They were quite the least choice of the collection. Chris, when he was not swearing, wept moistly, and so touched the heart of Aunt Jane that we lived in fear of her letting him go if she got the opportunity. He told her that he had lost an aunt in his tender youth, of whom she reminded him in the most striking way, and that if this long-mourned relative had lived he felt he should have been a better man and not led away against his higher nature by the chance of falling in with bad companions. Aunt Jane thought her resemblance to Chris's aunt a remarkable coincidence and an opportunity for appealing to his better self which should be improved. She wanted to improve it by untying his hands, because he had sprained his wrist in his childhood and it was sensitive. He had sprained it in rescuing a little companion from drowning, the child of a drunkard who had unfeelingly thrown his offspring down a well. This episode had been an example to Chris which had kept him from drinking all his life, until he had fallen into his present rough company.
Aunt Jane took it very hard that the Scotchman seemed quite unfeeling about Chris's wrist. She said it seemed very strange to her in a man who had so recently known the sorrows of captivity himself. She said she supposed even suffering would not soften some natures.
As to Magnus, his state of sullen fury made him indifferent even to threats of punishment. He swore with a determination and fluency worthy of a better cause. For myself, I could not endure his neighborhood. It seemed to me I could not live through the days that must intervene before the arrival of the Rufus Smith in the constant presence of this wretch.
More than all, it made Dugald and Cuthbert unwilling to leave the camp together. There was always the possibility that the two ruffians might find means to free themselves, and, with none but Cookie and the women present, to obtain control of the firearms and the camp. For the negro, once the men were free, could not surely be depended on to face them. Loyal he was, and valiant in his fashion, but old and with the habit of submission. One did not see him standing up for long before two berserker-mad ruffians.
What to do with the pirates continued for a day and a night a knotty problem.