He had.
“Look,” cried Yves. He opened the pouch, it was filled with big pieces of gold; they had been wrapped in oilskin, he had flung the oilskin away and he stood with his two great hands outspread clasping the pouch and the treasure bursting from it.
Gaspard at the sight gave a cry that rang across the islet and was answered by the ever-wheeling gulls.
“Gold!” cried Gaspard, seizing a piece from the hand of Yves. He examined it, bit it, glanced at it again. He seemed dazed and had the look of a man who, long a prisoner in darkness, had been suddenly brought face to face with a powerful light. The piece of gold was Spanish, a piece of eight, heavy, and stamped with the stately effigies of a vanished king.
“Look!” cried Yves, taking the coin back from the hand of Gaspard and replacing it in the pouch with the others. “Look!” As he buckled the pouch he pointed with his foot at something amidst the bushes. Just here the bushes were thinner than elsewhere and here the ground was raised in a little mound. Amidst the bushes, white and desolate, lay some bones. They were strewn hither and thither. One might have fancied that here once lay a skeleton, the embers of a man that some wind had blown upon and scattered. A skeleton, in fact, had once lain here, on or amongst the bushes, but so long ago that the bushes dying and growing again had cast the fragments apart. The skeleton of a man; the skull which Gaspard had picked up and was now holding in his hand told that.
It was a strange skull, small and deformed, hideously broad across the cheek-bones; the bones of the thigh easily distinguished by even the untrained eyes of the sailors were unequal in length, the shorter of them had been injured or broken, for it shewed the thickening where callus had formed.
“Pah!” cried Gaspard, flinging the skull down. “He must have been a beauty whoever he was—and look.” He picked up an old pistol-barrel, eaten away by rust, the trigger plate thin as a leaf and crumbling like a withered leaf to the touch lay near. Many, many years of exposure it must have taken to eat the metal away like that. Yves glanced at the thing without interest. “Come,” said he, and turning, he led the way to the southern beach. Here under the palm trees he sat down, opened the pouch, and rattled the gold pieces on the sand between his outspread legs.
Gaspard, who had followed him without a word, stood, without a word, looking on.
Yves counted the pieces; there were twenty-one of them and he was disappointed; there had seemed more. He began to recount them. He had scarcely done so when Gaspard broke silence.
“Look here,” said Gaspard, “half of that falls to my share; half of that belongs to me by all rights.”