“You never said a word to me,” cut in Jude.
“Get back to your place and don’t be chewin’ in my ear,” said Satan, reaching for the chart and pocketing it again. “Tell you? Likely! Why, if I had, you’d have let it out, same as you did the lie of the reef to Rat here the other day. Get on with your dinner! Why haven’t we any potatoes?”
“No time to boil them,” said Jude, “cleanin’ up your mushy abalones.”
“No time, and you yarnin’ and havin’ your future told! I heard you.”
“My fault,” said Ratcliffe. “I began the business.”
“Not you,” said Satan. “I heard her start in on it, sayin’ what she’d do with a fortune if she had it and finishin’ up by mistrustin’ me.”
“Lord love you for a liar! I only said them two guys had done you in over the wreck,” cried Jude. “Don’t be stickin’ words in my mouth.”
“How was it you came to spot the cryptogram?” asked Ratcliffe, eager to cut the dissension short.
“The which?” asked Satan. “Oh, ay—well, it come natural for me to say to myself, ‘Here’s a thing that’s been hid up and kept secret, yet it’s all wrote out as plain as my palm.’ I said to myself, ‘It’s too blame simple! A man who knows where money is hid doesn’t write the location on a bit of paper, to be lost, maybe, and picked up by God knows who. Why, drop that chart in the streets of Havana, and the first chap with any knowledge in his head that picks it up will turn it into dollars right off. It’s a sure bait for fools, anyhow, and a wreckin’ expedition would be out before the end of the week. They’d only have to look up any chart that’s been printed the last hundred years to find Lone Reef as easy as the Swimmer Rocks.’ Then I said to myself, ‘What in the nation did the guy want makin’ a chart at all for? Why couldn’t he have written on a piece of paper, “The Nombre de Dios lies on Lone Reef, sou’west of Rum Cay”? That’s all the chart says, and yet he must go and make drawin’s; must have taken him an hour’s pen scraping to make that chart.’ Puttin’ the two things together, I says to myself, ‘The feller concerned must have been a fool in two ways if this thing’s genuine,—a fool to leave the fac’s as plain as an ad for liver pills, and a fool to waste his time drawin’ his advertisement instead of writin’ it,’ but I reckoned he was no fool. Dad was always quotin’ some damn ass who said the world was most made up of fools. Well, in my ’xperience that don’t hold. Maybe in Europe it does, but not in Havana and the Gulf ports, anyway. So I says to myself, ‘Let’s try and see what the guy was drivin’ at.’”