“Not now—but eighty or so years ago there was likely an opening, and that place was a kind of harbour. Serpente would have used that harbour.”
“But,” said Gaspard, “why should he have scuttled his ship?”
“Ah, why?—who knows? We know he was chased; we know he had a cargo of slaves, and a crew each man of whom was a witness against him. He may have kept a boat provisioned and moored to the ship’s side; then, at night, with a confederate, battened the hatches, main and fo’cs’le, scuttled her, and made for the American coast in the boat—see?”
Sagesse seemed to have worked out the whole question in his dark mind and seemed deeply dissatisfied with the solution arrived at.
“But,” said Gaspard, “how about those bones we found, that skull?”
“Oh, the skull! He may have been killed in turn, and robbed of his treasure by his confederate,—who knows? there are a hundred ways of making skulls in a job like that. Only I say this: I lay a hundred to one, if he scuttled his ship, he didn’t scuttle her with the money on board.”
“Then it’s a hundred to one we will find nothing.”
“I said it was a hundred to one if he scuttled her the money wasn’t on board. I don’t know whether he scuttled her or not; I’m only supposing that he did it. No, the chances are not so bad as that, but they aren’t as good as I thought. But—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t smell money there. It may be stupidity, it may be I don’t know what, but when there’s money in a thing I seem to know it. I don’t seem to feel there is money on that ship.”