"You have been listening to Bonteck's ghost stories," I jested. "You mustn't take them for matters of fact."
"But there is a wreck," she insisted; "I mean besides the one on the reef opposite our camp."
"Oh, yes; there is a bare suggestion of an older wreck," I said. "We'll go and have a look at it, if you like. It's on the north beach, and we can go back that way. Would you care to see it?"
She nodded, and we strolled on in sober silence for another half-mile. I was afraid I was not making much of a success of the job of keeping her spirits up, and was beginning to wish very heartily that I had made Bonteck do his own jollying. Just why she should be looking upon the blue side of things at last, after she had been the one to do most of the cheering in the past, I couldn't imagine at first, but a bit later the solution—or a possible solution—came to me. Perhaps the invalid, knowing that he was going to lose some of his hold upon her through Van Dyck's insistence upon more freedom for her, had been pressing the Ingerson claim still harder.
The wreck of the galleon—if, indeed, the few bits of barnacled timber and rusting ironwork could, by any stretch of imagination, be dated back to a period so remote as that of the conquest of Peru—was in the bight of a little bay, well sheltered by the tallest of the palms, which effectually screened it from our camp end of the island. It wanted possibly half an hour of sunset when we came upon the few dumb relics, and the shadows of the palms were making weird traceries upon the white sand of the beach.
Assuming that the largest of the charred and blackened "bones" was the stem of the ancient wreck, it was to be inferred that the ship had entered the lagoon bay through the seaward opening in the outer reef, had been beached bows on, and had so lain and burned, or rotted. Assuming, again, that the vessel had really been one of the old, high-bowed galleons, it was apparent that the beaching had been done with considerable force; a drive so hard that the bowsprit of the ship must have been thrust like a huge pointing finger into the jungle thicketing, which, at this point, ran well down to the edge of the lagoon.
It was Van Dyck who made this hypothetical platting of the beaching of the vessel for us; Bonteck himself, who had slipped ghost-like out of the palm shadows to join us while we were trying to trace the skeleton outline of the ship's timbering in the obliterating sands.
"I've been all over this ground before," he explained, and for once in a way he seemed to have thrown off the burden, whatever it was, that had been weighing him down. "More than that, I've waded around here when the tide was out and made good on some of the guesses."
"Are you counting upon finding the lost treasure?" I joked; and he took me up promptly.
"Why not? Stranger things than that have happened, haven't they?"