The Adventures of Captain Horn

by Frank R. Stockton

"It was ten days ago," said his sister.

"Is that so? I thought it was longer than that. But no matter. Since that letter came, I have been completely upset. I want to know what I am to do, and, whatever I am to do, I want to get at it. From what the captain wrote, and from what I remember of the size and weight of those gold bars, he must have got away with more than a million dollars—perhaps a million and a half. Now, what part of that is mine? What am I to do with it? When am I to begin to prepare myself for the life I am to lead when I get it? All this I want to know, and, more than that, I want to know what you are going to do. Now, if I had got to Acapulco, or any other civilized spot, with a million dollars in solid gold, it would not have been ten days before I should have written to my family,—for I suppose that is what we are,—and should have told them what I was going to do, and how much they might count on. But I hope now that letter does tell?"

"The best thing to do," said Edna, taking up the letter from the table, "is to read it to you. But before I begin I want to say something, and that is that it is very wrong of you to get into these habits of calculating about what may come to you. What is to come will come, and you might as well wait for it without upsetting your mind by all sorts of wild anticipations; and, besides this, you must remember that you are not of age, and that I am your guardian, and whatever fortune may now come to you will be under my charge until you are twenty-one."

"Oh, I don't care about that," said Ralph. "We will have no trouble about agreeing what is the best thing for me to do. But now go ahead with the letter."

"'I am going to tell you'" (at the beginning of the second paragraph) "'of a very strange thing which happened to me since I last wrote. I will first state that after my guano-bags had all been safely stored in the warerooms I have hired, I had a heavy piece of work getting the packages of gold out of the bags, and in packing the bars in small, stout boxes I found in the City of Mexico and had sent down here. In looking around for boxes which would suit my purpose, I discovered these, which had been used for stereotype plates. They were stamped on the outside, and just what I wanted, being about as heavy after I packed them with gold as they were when they were filled with type-metal. This packing I had to do principally at night, when I was supposed to be working in a little office attached to the rooms. As soon as this was done, I sent all the boxes to a safe-deposit bank in Mexico, and there the greater part of them are yet. Some I have shipped to the mint in San Francisco, some have gone North, and I am getting rid of the rest as fast as I can.

"'The gold bars, cast in a form novel to all dealers, have excited a good deal of surprise and questioning, but for this I care very little. My main object is to get the gold separated as many miles as possible from the guano, for if the two should be connected in the mind of any one who knew where the guano was last shipped from, I might have cause for anxiety. But as the bars bear no sort of mark to indicate that they were cast by ancient Peruvians, and, so far as I can remember,—and I have visited several museums in South America,—these castings are not like any others that have come down to us from the times of the Incas, the gold must have been cast in this simple form merely for convenience in transportation and packing. Some people may think it is California gold, some may think it comes from South America, but, whatever they think, they know it is pure gold, and they have no right to doubt that it belongs to me. Of course, if I were a stranger it might be different, but wherever I have dealt I am known, or I send a good reference. And now I will come to the point of this letter.

"'Three days ago I was in my office, waiting to see a man to whom I hoped to sell my stock of guano, when a man came in,—but not the one I expected to see,—and if a ghost had appeared before me, I could not have been more surprised. I do not know whether or not you remember the two American sailors who were the first to go out prospecting, after Mr. Rynders and his men left us, and who did not return. This man was one of them—Edward Shirley by name.'"

"I remember him perfectly!" cried Ralph. "And the other fellow was George Burke. On board the Castor I used to talk to them more than to any of the other sailors."

"'But astonished as I was,'" Edna went on to read, "'Shirley did not seem at all surprised, but came forward and shook hands most heartily. He said he had read in a newspaper that I had been rescued, and was doing business in Acapulco, and he had come down on purpose to find me. I told him how we had given up him and his mate for lost, and then, as he had read a very slim account of our adventures, I told him the whole story, taking great care, as you may guess, not to say anything about the treasure mound. He did not ask any questions as to why I did not come back with the rest of you, but was greatly troubled when he heard of the murders of every man of our crew except himself and Burke and Maka.

"'When I had finished, he told me his story, which I will condense as much as possible. When he and Burke started out, they first began to make their way along the slope of the rocky ridge which ended in our caves, but they found this very hard work, so they soon went down to the sandy country to the north. Here they shot some little beast or other, and while they were hunting another one, up hill and down dale, they found night was coming on, and they were afraid to retrace their steps for fear they might come to trouble in the darkness. So they ate what they had with them, and camped, and the next morning the mountains to the east seemed to be so near them that they thought it much easier to push on instead of coming back to us. They thought that when they got to the fertile country they would find a settlement, and then they might be able to do something for the rest of the party, and it would be much wiser to go ahead than to turn back. But they found themselves greatly mistaken. Mountains in the distance, seen over a plain, appear very much nearer than they are, and these two poor fellows walked and walked, until they were pretty nearly dead. The story is a long one as Shirley told it to me, but just as they were about giving up entirely, they were found by a little party of natives, who had seen them from a long distance and had come to them.