"On the contrary, you interest me vastly," he replied. "Consider, had it not been for my humble self, you had now been lying with your throat cut beside the open grave--or, perhaps, we might have buried you, with some pretence of decent feelings."
And so I told him as much as I thought it would do him no harm to hear--of how I had been found by the wild men of the woods, and had journeyed by myself to Cahazaxa's Temple. Thence, I told him, I had found my way to the Wood of the Red Fish, where I had had the good fortune to fall in with William Rushby. But I told him nothing of Atupo, the Peruvian priest, or of the map which I myself had found by so singular a chance, or of the Treasure that my living eyes had looked upon.
"And this is all your story?" he asked.
I thought it best not to answer him; but I saw by the sly, half-amused expression upon his face that he knew well enough that I would keep him half in the dark.
He said nothing for a long time. And then quite suddenly, he slapped a hand upon a knee.
"Upon my life and soul," he cried, "you are a lad of spirit, such as I myself once was, until I learned that in this world it is best to assume a pose! Let me explain to you. There are certain commodities upon the earth that all men are ever after, and money is the first of these. We are, therefore, all enemies of one another; we scramble in the same gutter--to such heights has civilisation attained. Be set down for a fool, a lazy rascal and a fop, and it is easy enough to take by surprise those who think they have the whip-hand of you. You have had an example of this yourself in your own brief experience of Gilbert Forsyth. When you made off from John Bannister's cabin, on the morning when you saw us first, you never suspected that I was the one who would catch you. And so now. It is I who will outwit you, where friend Amos, with his knife and oaths, has failed already."
I pricked my ears at that; for my curiosity was roused.
"And where are we going?" I asked.
"To William Rushby," he answered, "sometime boatswain of the Mary Greenfield."
"And why?" I asked.