“It occurred to me that this must be another commissary fraud, but when I tried to move the case it seemed heavy as lead. I poked my arm down into the grass and rummaged around. At last I struck something hard and square down near the middle, but it didn’t feel like a meat tin. I worked it out, and lit a match. It was a gold brick, and it must have weighed ten pounds.”
“Solid, real gold?” cried Elliott, with a sudden memory of Salt Lake.
“The real thing. It didn’t take me long to gut that box, and I dug out nineteen more bricks, nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth, I reckoned. No wonder it was heavy. Then I looked over the rest of the cases, and they all looked just alike, and there were twenty-three of them, so I figured up that there must be considerably over a million in those boxes.”
“Stolen from the Pretoria treasury!” Elliott exclaimed.
“I believe it was, but what made you think of that?”
“Never mind; I’ll tell you later. Go on.”
“Well, I felt pretty certain that this gold came from the Rand, of course, but who it belonged to, or why he had shipped it on this old tramp steamer was what I couldn’t make out. Of course, if he was going to ship it on this boat, it was easy to understand that it might be safer to pass it as corned beef, but the whole thing looked queer and crooked to me.
“At first I was fairly off my head at the find, but when I came to think it over, it looked like there wasn’t anything in it for me, after all. I couldn’t walk off with those bricks. They might be government stuff, and I didn’t want any trouble with Secret Service men. So after awhile I packed up the box again as well as I could and fixed the lid.
“I thought I’d lie low for awhile, and I stayed in that black hole till I’d drunk all my bottle of water and was pretty near ready to eat my boots. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I raised a devil of a racket, yelling, and hammering on the deck overhead with a piece of plank, and I kept this up, off and on, for half a day before they hauled the hatch off and took me out. It was dark night, with a fresh wind, and the ship rolling, and I never smelt anything so good as that open air.
“The first thing they did was to drag me before that same mate for judgment, and he cursed me till he was blue. He’d have murdered me if he’d recognized me, and he nearly did anyway, for he sent me down to the stoke-hold.