Almost without thinking, I held the open page against one of the mirrors panelled in the saloon wall—and I could not repress a cry of astonishment. The scrawl was a decipherable sentence, mysterious enough, but coherent!—I’ll write it down for you as nearly as I remember it, so as to show you how it looked. He produced pencil and paper from his pocket, wrote: “lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne:” There you are—the last two words were added like a postscript and were followed by a rough sketch, an irregular oval over a St. Andrew’s cross, like this—
I read out what was written, and Pauline stared at me wide-eyed.
“Whatever could have made me write that?” she exclaimed.
Geoffrey looked up, fraternally scornful.
“It’s a thin joke, Pauline! You can’t monkey us in that fashion! I suppose you want to pretend that the ghost of some old pirate wrote it down in your book so as to start us off on a Treasure Island hunt.” Stevenson’s romance was then in its first success and Geoffrey had just been reading it. “Of course, you wrote it deliberately—what nonsense!”
She turned round upon him, her eyes filling with tears in the vehemence of her protest.
“Geoffrey, I couldn’t!—I couldn’t write reversed like that if I tried!”
“Oh, yes, you could,” asserted Geoffrey, confidently. “It’s easy enough.”
“Supposing we all try,” said I, curious to test its feasibility. I felt considerably puzzled. Pauline was not at all the sort of girl one would expect to persist in such a pointless sort of practical joke as this, and persistent she was—tearful like a child unjustly accused of a crime of which it protests innocence.