"You don't really believe that part of the story, do you, Bonteck?" said Madeleine, with an amused smile.
"All or none," he answered cheerfully. "And, again, I say, why not? Don't you want to take a few shares in the Great Galleon Treasure Company, Unlimited?"
I thought it a happy circumstance that she could meet him playfully in the open field of badinage.
"Of course I do," she returned. "If I had a spade, I'd dig somewhere. Only I shouldn't know where to dig."
"Suppose we figure out the probabilities," Bonteck suggested, and if his enthusiasm wasn't real, it was an exceedingly good imitation. "The first requirement, of course, is to take the old story at its face value. Just imagine Sir Francis Drake's Pasha, or it might have been the Swan, out yonder on the other side of the reef, pouring hot shot into the poor, old, stranded Santa Lucia here on the beach. The Spaniards would take the treasure out over the bows, because that would be the only sheltered place, don't you see? Does that suggest anything?"
I think I have already said that Miss Barclay's gift, or rather one of them, was an acutely responsive mentality; or if I haven't, I meant to. She was standing with Van Dyck upon the exact spot the Spaniards—real or mythical—must have stood to be out of cannon-shot reach in unloading the treasure. Without a moment's hesitation she took up the thread of Bonteck's imaginings.
"If they started from here they would run for the nearest woods, wouldn't they?—keeping their ship between them and the English cannons. That is what I should have done." And then, purely in a spirit of keeping up the fiction, I am sure: "Let us follow them and see where they went."
Bonteck agreed at once. "Come on," he said; and the three of us set out to cross the island in a diagonal line, looking back from time to time to keep the fancied direction of the Spaniards retreating from their burning ship.
It was in a little open space in the midst of a palm and palmetto thicket that we paused.
"This is the place," Madeleine announced calmly. "Meaning to hide our treasure chest, we wouldn't go all the way across to the other beach. We'd hurry and scrape away the leaves and things here in the thickest part of the woods, and dig a hole, and——"