"Nonsense!"
"I am the last of the band of Colonel Dartois the Filibuster, and I tell you I am the sole treasurer of the crew."
The Englishman was not acquainted with that adventurer, of much notoriety in his day on the Pacific Coast, but the tone of the dying man was sincere.
"Be quick, then, thou dying one, to give the clue," said he as if convinced, whether so or not.
[CHAPTER IV.]
A DESERT MYSTERY.
Upon this enjoinder of so eminently practical a nature, and thoroughly aware of the necessity of haste, the fallen Mexican rapidly drew with his ramrod end, upon a space of earth smoothed by his foot in its deerskin boot, like an antique tablet under the stylus, a map—rude, but, to a navigator, plain and ample.
"At this point," said he, "a sunken reef trends north and south, with a break at a little bow a quarter mile from the black rock that juts out all but flush with its ripple. Deep water in 'the pot,' and there we anchored to ride to a submerged buoy, so that the cankerworm would not attack the metal or the borer the wood—a chest, bound with yellow metal. If it shall have broke away, its weight would only have sunk it deep in the oyster bed, all the shells there smashed to powdery scales by the drags. A diver will find it for you, then."
"Now, swear to me!" he went on, forcing his weakening voice to keep an even tenor. "Swear that one-half the contents of that hiding place shall be Ignacio Santamaria's, my brother-in-law's, who will give enough to his sister, my Angela. And the rest—be it yours, brave and Christian heart."