“Devil or not!” said old Vandermeulen. “I guess if there’s any buried treasure lying around here, I’m going to peg out my claim on it.” He turned to me. “Young man, was there ever any pirates about these parts?” The old ruffian was quite illiterate; had never, I believe, read a book in his life.
“Why, yes,” I replied, “from the end of the sixteenth century these seas were the chief haunt of the buccaneers and, after them, of the pirates who were not entirely suppressed until well in the eighteenth century. There must be any amount of their hidden treasure buried in these islands.”
“You don’t say!” he exclaimed, his avaricious old eyes lighting up. “And here have I been running this yacht up and down these parts for five years at a dead loss!” His disgust would have been comic, were it not for the ugly, ruthless lust of gold which looked suddenly out of his face. “Guess I’m going to quit this fooling around right away! I don’t know and don’t care if it was the Devil himself wrote this specification in Pauline’s book—I’m darned sure she didn’t write it herself—the handwriting’s different, d’you see?”—It was, as a matter of fact, compared with the previous pages, quite another hand—hers was an upright, rounded schoolgirl calligraphy, this was a cursive old-fashioned script inclined well forward. “So as we’ve got nothing else to start upon, we may as well see if there’s anything to it.” He tossed Geoffrey’s transcription across to me. “What do you make of it, young man?” he asked, with the sneering condescension he accorded to my superior literary attainments.
I took it, rather amused at the old scoundrel’s simplicity. That there was any authentic meaning in Pauline’s scrawl seemed to me wildly improbable. I was a frank materialist in those days and had Carpenter’s formula of “unconscious cerebration” glibly ready to cover up anything psychologically abnormal. However, I considered the sheet of paper with attention.
“Assuming this to be a genuine message,” I said, “it would appear to give the precise latitude and longitude of some point where it is desirable to dig. I take it that the figures stand for 13 degrees 24 minutes North, 81 degrees 27 minutes West. The world ‘lucia’ puzzles me—unless the island of St. Lucia is meant. What ‘katalina’ stands for, I do not know—it is evidently a proper name of some kind, ‘sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge’ presumably means that one should dig under three trees south-west-by-south of Skull Point—wherever that is. ‘jno dawson’ is, of course, John Dawson. Assuming this to be a spirit-message from the other world,” I could not help smiling ironically, “it is possibly the name of the ghost who is communicating—and who desires to indicate to some person that it is his or her turn. He does not specify for what. I may remark that the ghost is either ill-educated or he has an archaic taste in spelling.”
“I don’t like it,” said Mrs. Vandermeulen, querulously timid. “Do tear it up, William! I am sure harm will come of it!—It is the Devil tempting you!”
“So long as he’s serious, he can tempt me sure easy!” said the old ruffian in a tone of cool blasphemy which sent the colour out of his wife’s face. He rang the bell and the negro steward appeared. “Sam! Ask Captain Higgins to step in here for a moment!”
Captain Higgins, the skipper of the yacht, was a level-headed mariner of middle age whom nothing ever ruffled. He was competence itself.
“Good evening, Captain Higgins,” said old Vandermeulen, fixing him with the keen eyes under shaggy gray brows, eyes which defied you to divine his purpose whilst they probed yours. “What’s the latitude and longitude of the island of St. Lucia?”
“Fourteen North, sixty-one West,” replied Captain Higgins promptly.