He who lay there before me in the moonlight had once been a man and a soldier of old Spain; for his bony hands were crossed upon his chest and held between them the handle of a naked sword. And at his head was a steel helmet, and the trunk of his body was enclosed in a breastplate; so that I could see naught but his grinning skull and the white bones of his legs and arms.
I stood and looked, and wondered. I wondered who he was, how he had come there, and of the tales that he could tell, were life to return to this bold adventurer of four hundred years ago. Though I do not fear death more than most men, I dread even to this day to look upon the face of it; and it took me time to gather my courage in both hands and to light a fire by the graveside, that I might see the better and solve so much of the mystery as I could.
I have no proof--for we can seldom prove the past--but must weigh what evidence there is. For all that, I am convinced--now that I have thought and talked of it all to John Bannister and others--that I looked then upon the remnants of one of the soldiers of the gallant Orellano. I could not judge of the quality of the rusted steel of his breastplate and his sword; but I should think that he had been an officer of some distinction; since, on close inspection, I discovered that the long blade had been damascened in silver, a metal that will never rust. And that set my mind a-thinking of the great and gallant men who had been the first to cross to the Pacific, to whom to-day--in spite of all their bigotry and cruelty--the world owes so much.
If one of Orellano's followers had lain buried in this place for all this time, how nearly had the Spaniards come to finding the Greater Treasure! I was not far, I knew, from the Big Fish, though I had searched the Wood for days and never found it. And Orellano had crossed the mountains to the west in search of El Dorado, and, having failed in his purpose, had gone on down to the great river, and thence to the Atlantic. And here lay one of his stout-hearted lieutenants, buried like a Christian warrior, with the arms he had fought with, within a few miles from where the Treasure lay.
Wonder-struck, and not without great reverence, I put back the sword between those bony hands, and then lifted the helmet to see if that, too, could tell me anything concerning this tragedy of long ago. Besides, I was curious to know how the man had met his death. Had he been slain by a savage Indian? Or had he died of some fell, tropical disease? And so I took the helmet in my hands; and when I did so, something white fell out.
I stooped and picked it up, and then examined it by the fire that I had lighted. It was parchment--it was a fragment of a map--a piece torn from the corner of a larger sheet. I looked at it and rubbed my eyes, and looked again, to be sure that I was not dreaming.
If I did not dream, then I was wholly mad. The thought came to me that I had fallen into a fever, and now suffered one of those delusions which are common enough when the heart is racing and the brow dry and burning.
I felt my pulse and the skin upon my forearm, and found that I was wet with sweat. Nor was I mad or dreaming, for I was Dick Treadgold, and my home lay far away, upon the Sussex shore. And yet, that which I held in my hand was the very fragment of John Bannister's map which I myself had torn from the hands of Amos Baverstock--that same fragment which I had thrust, to the full length of my arm, down a rabbit-hole, by Middleton, for fear that it should fall into the possession of that scoundrel, Joshua Trust.
There can be no disputing the testimony of a torn piece of paper. There is, I believe, a celebrated murder trial, quoted in books of law as an example of irrefutable circumstantial evidence, wherein the murderer and the murdered man are each found in possession of a torn piece of newspaper, these two fragments fitting together line for line without a letter missing.
You will never tear a sheet of paper twice in precisely the same way, though you try a million times. In this case, I had the evidence of my eyes and of my memory. It was the very fragment I had snatched from the hands of Amos; I remembered the shape of it; I remembered the shape also of the torn edge of the map that Amos himself had carried into the wilderness; and, above all, there were the letters "AHAZAXA," the rending of the parchment having decapitated the name "Cahazaxa."