"I know," I nodded; "know more than you think I do, perhaps. Get on with your story."
"Reading a story is what put the notion into my head, in the beginning. In an old book of the Elizabethan voyages and discoveries I came across this tale of a burned galleon and a treasure that was never found. What I wanted to do was to put enough money into Madeleine's hands—money that she would believe was unquestionably her own—to square up her father's crooked accounts. This 'Treasure Island' business seemed to offer the means. About that time I ran across Captain Svenson, the commander of your rescue ship, and besides giving me the latitude and longitude of this island, he told me that he believed it to be the 'Lost Island' of the old English privateers, and the same which was known later, in the buccaneers' time, as 'Pirates' Hope.' Also, he told me that you had told him of the existence of the old wreck. Don't let me bore you with too much detail."
"I am too greatly infuriated to be bored. What is the rest of it?"
"Mere romantic flubdub, you'll say. I bought from the subtreasury a quarter of a million dollars in gold bars—and had a devil of a time cooking up a reasonable excuse for the purchase, as you would imagine. These bars I had remelted and cast into rough ingots of about forty pounds each. As a matter of secrecy, and to make them easily portable, each of the ingots was packed in a box by itself, the boxes were marked 'Ammunition,' and it was as ammunition that the stuff was secretly put aboard the Andromeda at her North River anchorage."
"Sure!" I derided. "When ostriches do a much less naïve thing we call them silly birds. I'd be willing to bet largely that any number of New York crooks knew what was in your cartridge boxes long before you ever got them overside in the Andromeda. What next?"
"Next, I cleared the yacht for Havana, having first made arrangements to have the winter-cruise party meet me in New Orleans some three weeks later. I'll admit now that I was a bit shaky about some part of my crew. I had told Goff that I didn't want too much intelligence aboard, and after we put to sea it struck me that he had rather overdone the thing. We had a few Provincetown Portuguese who were all right, but the lot Goff picked up in New York—foreigners to a man—didn't look very good to me; nothing especially desperate, you know, but with the gold on board it seemed up to me to keep a weather eye open."
"Some glimmerings of common sense now and then: you're to be congratulated," I said.
"Rub it in; I've got it coming to me. Holding that cautious notion in mind, I made the southward voyage look as much like a pleasure jaunt as possible, touching at Havana, again at Port au Prince, and a little later at Kingston. From Jamaica we shot across to South American waters, and at Curaçao I gave the bulk of the crew shore leave for two days. Then, with the bunch stripped down to Goff, the engine- and fire-room squads, and two or three of the Portuguese, we made a fly-by-night run to this island. You've got my notion by this time, haven't you?"
"Partly; but go on."
"We made land about two o'clock in the morning, rounded this point of the island, and dropped anchor just off the inlet opening to Spaniards' Bay. With all hands off duty for the night, Goff and I got the electric launch overside and landed the gold—which was some job for just the two of us; something over fifteen hundred pounds in the lot. But, as I say, we got it ashore, lugged it piecemeal to the little inland glade, and there, by the light of a ship's lantern, we buried it, taking the precaution to mark the place with that chunk of coral."