“If we can only find it,” he went on, as he gazed dreamily away over the landscape of hill and dell, of crimson and green. “If we could but find it, we—I and Mina and my sister—should be no longer poor, while brave young Miguel should be able to continue and finish his studies without further toil, or the terrible hardship of the herring fishery and harvesting.”
He seemed speaking just then more to himself or to Dash, on whose beautiful head his hand was placed, than to me. Then after a few moments’ silence and a sigh or two, he turned once more round.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but for the moment I believe, so absorbed was I in my own thoughts, that I forgot your presence. But now I shall speak.
“You are doubtless sceptical concerning this buried treasure,” he continued.
“I fear so,” I replied, smiling.
“Well, but you will not be so when you hear my yarn. Moreover, you will agree with me that it is not any one else’s gold we—and the ‘we’ must include you, my valued friend—are going in search of. No, it is my own and that of Miguel—in other words, that of our dead-and-gone forbears, or ancestors.”
“And you don’t think it will be a wild-goose chase?”
“On the contrary,” Captain Reeves replied, with a considerable amount of energy, “it will be a dead certainty.”
“But listen, if you will; it is quite a long time before sunset yet, and I am tired of wandering after these half-scared ptarmigan and grouse.”
He took from his pocket some papers as he spoke, and began turning them over.