“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Sellers. “She weren’t no ship with gold plates,—your dad got that wrong,—she was a big Spanish ship out of Vera Cruz making for Spain. She had a cargo of timber, some of them heavy foreign timbers that don’t float. She’d got aboard her, besides the timber, more’n a million dollars’ worth of gold,—Mexican gold most of it, Spanish coin some of it. Lopez was the name of the skipper, and he laid to bank that gold for himself. He’d been forty years in these seas and knew every key and sandbank same as the insides of his own pockets.
“Him and the mate were the only men in the know about that gold beside a supercargo by name of Perez.
“Well, he colluded together with them two guys to sink the hooker in six fathom water out of trade tracks, give out that she’d sunk in a gale, and come back in a year or two and collar the boodle. They had her bored and plugged for the game, and when they got her to the location they pulled out the plugs, and she went down without a sneeze, natural as a dyin’ Christian.
“They got the boats away in order, and the crew was got off to a man; but that crew never got ashore. Maybe it was something wrong with the grub or the water, there’s no saying, but they never got ashore to turn witness. But the grub and water was all right in the dinghy. Them three guys had taken the dinghy, and they were picked up and landed somewhere on the gulf, fat and well.”
All through Sellers’ recitation Carquinez had sat nodding his head. He glanced now at Satan and Ratcliffe as if measuring its effect upon them, then he half closed his eyes again and retired into himself like a tortoise.
“They slung their yarn,” went on Sellers, “and made all good, and it was only left for them to wait awhile and hire or steal a likely boat to pick up the stuff, when the yellow fever took the supercargo and the mate, leaving Lopez to fish for himself.
“He got back to Havana, which was his natural home, and there he put up with his son, who was a trader in tobacco, got a bit of a factory not bigger than a henh’us, and turned out a brand of cigars made out of leavin’s and brown paper mostly.
“He put the son wise about the wreck; but he wouldn’t give the location away till it was time to go and pick up the stuff, which wouldn’t be for a year yet.
“Then he up and died, and the son started to hunt for the chart and couldn’t find it. The old guy had given him everything but the chart with the location marked on it. It wasn’t a proper chart, neither: just a piece of paper with the thing done rough, but giving the bearings. And it was never found—not by the son. The grandson found it—and where do you think? Pasted into the lining of an old hat. That wasn’t so long ago, neither, and what do you think that fool of a grandson did? Well, I’ll tell you what he did. First of all he comes to Cark here, and tries to get him onto the job on a ten per cent basis, Cark to risk his money and repitation for a lousy ten per cent on what might be only the bones of an old ship. He let out her name and history and everything but the location.
“Cark wasn’t having any on those terms,—was you, Cark?—and he told the chap to go to Medicine Hat and pick bilberries. The chap goes off, and what does he do but tries to get up a syndicate between himself and two yeggmen without a keel to their names! Perrira was the name of one, and da Silva was the name of the other, and they held a board meeting in Diego’s saloon one night and shot holes in one another in the back parlor.