“Anyhow, I’m sure that he made up a plant with Burke to turn the trick on us. He knows where that gold is now; you can bank on that! And if you’ve been living with him for a month and don’t know too, you’re not the clever man I take you to be.”
“I think you’re just a little too clever yourself,” Elliott replied. “I’ll play my cards face up, too. I know just as much as you do about the location of that wreck, and that old missionary doesn’t know half as much. You’ve sized up his character wrong. He’s merely a simple, kind-hearted, unworldly old gentleman with no moral backbone. If he knew where all that gold was, I don’t believe he’d go after it. He might steal a hundred dollars if he saw it lying handy and happened to need it, but he wouldn’t take any interest in a million that he couldn’t see. As for his conspiring with Burke, much less killing him, that’s sheer bosh. He doesn’t know where the Clara McClay is, and I don’t either.”
“You’re too secretive for me,” said Sevier, looking downcast. “You won’t mind if I say candidly that I think you’re bluffing. Don’t tell me that you haven’t found out anything from that fellow Laurie, or Eaton, as he calls himself. Something is preventing you from sailing back to Africa and fishing up that million. I think we can supply what is lacking to you. We need you; you need us. Then join us, and we’ll work together.”
“You are right,” Elliott agreed. “There is something that prevents me from going there, and that is the fact that I don’t know where to go. But I don’t mind admitting that I’m going to try to find out. I have partners with me, too, and we have a little money to throw away.”
“How many partners have you?” Sevier inquired.
“Three.”
“Well, bring them all in. We’ll share and share alike.”
Elliott seriously considered this proposition for a couple of minutes. But he knew that Henninger would accept no such arrangement.
“I couldn’t make such a deal without consulting the other men,” he said. “And I know that the chief of our gang would never stand for it. He’s rather a whole hog or nothing man, and I’m a little that way myself. No, I’m afraid we’ll have to work separately.”
“Is that your final word?”