"Aye," he went on in his humorous way, "I am convinced 'twill be hidden treasure we'll find, Jock. We'll go ashore at midnight, and under a stunted pine will be a sailor's chest. Hidden treasures are always found in sailors' chests, ye know. And taking a three-foot bar of iron, which every gentleman in tales carries concealed upon his person, we, you and I,—none of the others, of course,—will pry this chest open—to find ducats and doubloons, and piastres, and sous-marquees—and a map of the Spanish Main and the Dry Tortugas—with crosses in blood. I'll tell you, ye can have my share of it now," he cried, laughing at me.
"Ye're over generous," says I, for jesting of this kind was a thing to which I was accustomed in him.
He dropped the raillery on the moment, however, to take a note-book from his pocket.
"Whom shall we ask?" he inquired in his natural voice.
Now I had one other friend, almost as dear to me as Sandy, named Hugh Pitcairn. But while there could be no doubt of the affection each had for me, there could be equally no doubt of the dislike they bore each other, this feeling having grown from the first day they met in the hockey grounds of the High School, where almost at sight of each other they fell to fighting, until finally pulled apart by some of the older lads.
"In this connection," said I, getting back at him a bit, for his jeering at my plans, "what do you think of Hugh Pitcairn?"
"In this connection," he returned dryly, "I do not think of Hugh Pitcairn at all."
"It's strange," I went on, in the same remote tone, as though it were a subject mentioned for the first time, "that ye should dislike him so."
"It can not match the strangeness of any one's enduring his society," he replied with heat.
"Well, well," said I, putting Pitcairn out of the talk. "What do you say to Geordie MacAllister?"