"I thought we did."
"Good. So did I. Yet the fact remains that there are eighty-three gold bars safely stowed away in the yacht's fore-hold; forty of one kind and forty-three of another. How do you account for that?"
I laughed. "It simply means that Le Gros was more thorough than we were. He found your planting, as well as that of the Santa Lucia's crew."
"He did. But the double find was due to Goff's effort to gain time for us, rather than to the fat bandit's thoroughness. When we left Goff waiting for his recapture, the first thing he did was to heave the chunk of coral out of the way so that there wouldn't be any landmark. Then, when Le Gros and his men came, Goff pointed out first one place and then another, until he had them digging all over the glade. That is why they beat him so savagely; and it was after he was knocked out that they stumbled upon both hoards."
"Both in the same place?" I asked.
"Goff says they were not. He was just coming back to consciousness when they were starting to carry the stuff down to the beach. There were two heaps of it. In his battered condition Goff didn't realize the truth; he merely thought he was seeing double. Afterward, so he says, he got a crazy notion in his head that the pirates hadn't found my gold at all, and that it was up to him to find it. That was what he was trying to do when you went after him."
"I know," I said; "Are there any more knots in the tangle?"
"Just one. When I went below last night to turn in, Billy Grisdale was waiting for me with tears in his eyes; said he'd lost all his hopes of heaven, and begged me to turn back to the island and let him have men enough to go ashore and dig some more in the gold plantation—that we were leaving Edie's dowry behind. I asked him what he meant, and he told me. He and Edie had been the first to take fire when I told the old story of the Spanish treasure ship, and they had gone about looking for landmarks and digging haphazard in one place and another."
"And, of course, they stumbled upon the chunk of coral, rolled it away, and dug under it," I filled in, recalling instantly what Billy had said to me about buried treasure and the ownership thereof on the night of Ingerson's attempted suicide.
"You've said it. Naturally, it was my planting that they uncovered—not the Spaniards', but never having so much as heard of my earlier visit to the island, there was nothing to make them suspect that it was not the Santa Lucia hoard that they had unearthed. Their first impulse was to run back to camp and shout the good news; but the cannier second thought prevailed. They reburied the stuff in the hole they had made, marked the place as well as they could—but not with the chunk of coral they had rolled aside,—and came away and left it, meaning to part with their secret only when a rescue ship should come along."