They all gazed at the archipelago, two thumbs’ width on the paper that represented a hundred sea leagues. Somewhere among these islands lay the treasure that had cost the lives of a ship’s company already, and as he stared at the brown and yellow spots, Elliott saw in excited imagination the barren islands on the sunny tropical ocean, and the spray spouting high over the reefs where the sea-birds wheeled about the iron skeleton of the Clara McClay. There was the end of the rainbow; there was the golden magnet that had already stirred the passions of men on the other side of the world; and as he looked at the lettered surface of the map, he felt a sudden cold prescience of tragedy.
“Glorioso, Farquahar!” murmured Hawke. “They surely couldn’t have run so far out of their course as that. St. Lazarus is my choice, and, if I’m right, we’ll make it St. Dives.”
“We don’t know enough yet to make this any use,” said Henninger, suddenly. “Let’s get out.”
The sight of the map and its hundreds of miles of islands and seas did in fact bring the problem into concrete reality, and forcibly emphasized the difficulties. They all felt somewhat downcast and vaguely disappointed, but, as they were going down the steps, Elliott had an inspiration.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that if anybody escaped in the boats, they must have been picked up somewhere at sea. In that case, the fact is likely to be reported in some newspaper, isn’t it?”
“What have we been thinking of?” exclaimed Henninger. “You’re right, of course. The New York Herald should have it, as she was an American ship. We’ll go back and look through the files of the Herald, if they have them, for the last few months.”
The papers were bound up by months, and each man took a volume and sat down to run through the shipping news. Elliott finished his without finding anything, and obtained another file. He was half through this when Hawke tiptoed over to him.
“Here’s where Bennett appears,” he whispered.
It was a four-line telegram from Sydney, stating that a seaman named Bennett had been picked up from a raft in the Indian Ocean, reporting that the American steamer Clara McClay had foundered with all hands in the Mozambique Channel.
There was nothing new in this, but it seemed somehow encouraging, and while Elliott was reading it, Henninger came over to them. His eyes were sparkling, and he looked as if holding some strong emotion in check. He laid down his file before them, and put his finger on a paragraph, dated more than a fortnight earlier than the despatch from Sydney.