"What did you tell Billy?"
He grinned. "I took him into the fore-hold and showed him the pile of gold bars. As you would imagine, he was paralyzed when he counted and found there were eighty-three of them. 'There were forty-three—I'm sure there were only forty-three,' he kept saying over and over."
"Wait a minute," I interposed; "you are going too fast for me. Are you asking me to believe that it was only by chance that they rolled the piece of coral over to the exact spot where, we may suppose, it originally stood—marking the place of the Santa Lucia burial?"
"Chance and nothing else—excepting, perhaps, it may have rolled more easily that way than any other. It was Goff and I who moved it in the first place, you remember, when we took it to mark our gold grave."
"Now we may come back to Billy," I said. "What more did you tell him?"
"What could I tell him, save to hint that the Spaniards might have split their treasure and buried it in two places?—that, and to josh him a bit for having stopped too soon in his digging venture?"
"Then you told him that the remaining forty pieces belong to Madeleine?"
"I did; I have told them all. She found it, and it is hers. More than that, I have taken Jack Grey into my confidence in the matter of Barclay's shortage in his guardian accounts, and he will see to it that the Vancourt trust fund is made whole again."
"But, see here," I protested; "that is your quarter million that Billy and Edie are making off with!"