"Then you don't know that at this moment there is one hundred thousand dollars in gold in the hold of the Island Princess?"
"What?" I gasped.
"One hundred thousand dollars in gold."
I could not believe my ears. Certainly, so far as I was concerned, the secret had been well kept.
Then a new thought came to me, "Does Captain Falk know?" I asked.
"Yes," said Roger, "Captain Falk knows."
CHAPTER XII
A STRANGE TALE
Roger Hamlin's words were to linger a long time in my ears, and so far as I then could see, there was little to say in reply. A hundred thousand dollars in gold had bought, soul and body, many a better man than Captain Falk. At that very moment Falk was watching us from the quarter-deck with an expression on his face that was partly an amused smile, partly a sneer. Weak and conceited though he was, he was master of that ship and crew in more ways than one.
But Roger had not finished. "Do you remember, Ben," he continued in a low voice, but otherwise unmindful of those about us, "that some half a dozen years ago, when Thomas Webster was sore put to it for enough money to square his debts and make a clean start, the brig Vesper, on which he had sent a venture, returned him a profit so unbelievably great that he was able to pay his creditors and buy from the Shattucks the old Eastern Empress, which he fitted out for the voyage to Sumatra that saved his fortunes?"