“To the authorities at Cuba.”
“D’you remember Sellers talkin’ about landin’ the stuff,” asked Satan, “sayin’ they’d have to take it round to Santiago way? They thought I was drinkin’ all that in. If there were any dollars in the business, d’you think they’d touch Cuba? Not they! They’d either cache the stuff or run it to some likely port. I was laughin’ in my hat all the time. Now you may think me a suspicious cuss. I’m not; but a feller has to run by compass in this world or go off his course, and my compass in this turnout is Cark. I say he’s gone down to Lone Reef and given me the left leg over the business, and my compass is the fac’ that he can’t run straight. Not if he tried to, he couldn’t run straight; nor could Sellers nor Cleary. If them fellers were straight, I’d match them and give them a fair deal. As it is, they’re like a lot of blind bally-hoolies playin’ blindman’s buff, runnin’ round and round, with me in the middle, tryin’ to kidoodle me and bein’ kidoodled themselves. Forty dollars for them rotten pearls, and all sorts of fixin’s out of Sellers—and I haven’t done with them yet!”
It had seemed to Ratcliffe, on board the Juan, that Carquinez was the spider of the web of this business. It seemed to him now that the spider was Satan.
He began to wonder was there any wreck at all, was the treasure story a myth. The idea of these rogues being incited to dreams of fortune so that they might be plundered of pots of paint and cans of turpentine and a few dollars appealed to him immensely. He remembered Thelusson and Skelton, he remembered Jude’s yarn about fruit steamers being held up, he remembered Carquinez and Sellers, and he had just seen Cleary; and of a sudden Satan’s ocean-wide activities appeared before him in nightmare contrast with their microscopic results. Great steamers stopped for a bunch of bananas, yachts lying idle to careen the Sarah, ships sailing from Havana to hunt for buried treasure—but in reality to supply the wandering Sarah with cans of turpentine and a few dollars! Was there any treasure, or was the whole thing a Tyler fake invented by Pap and handed to his family as an heirloom? He could not resist the question.
“That chart you showed us,” said he,—“is there anything really in it?”
Satan took him at once.
“The chart’s all right,” said he, “for them that can read it. If you mean is it genuine, I reckon it is—for them that can read it. We’ll see some day if I’m right or wrong; but, honest truth, I’m not botherin’ much about it,—the chances are so big, as I told you before, against treasure huntin’, and even if we strike it what’s the use of barrels of gold to a feller like me? If you ask me, I’m botherin’ more about the kid than huntin’ for money.”
“You mean?”
“Jude. Suppose I was to get a bash on the head from one of them cusses, or drop to the smallpox, same as I pretended to Sellers, what’d become of the kid?”
The sound of the “kid” frying fish for supper came mixed with the question.