“Yes, unless I have no sense or judgment left. But she’ll tell you herself in a minute. I’ve sent for her.”
He left the room.
Candon got up and walked to and fro for a long time, his hands behind his back. Then he lifted up his chin and gazed before him with those clear eyes trained to look over vast distances.
The manhood had come back to him with the call to a greater adventure than any he had ever undertaken.
He heard an automobile drawing up in the street—voices. Then the door opened and Tommie stood before him. It closed, leaving them alone.
That is the story of Vanderdecken as told to me by Hank Fisher. The story of a man of temperament saved from himself by a woman. I met George du Cane at Pasadena a little while ago and he corroborated the tale giving me a few extra details left out by Hank. George said Tyrebuck collected his insurance all right on the Wear Jack, also that McGinnis and his crowd managed to escape from the Mexicans, and, making down the coast, were rescued by a tanker which had put into Santa Clara Bay owing to a defect in her machinery. They returned to San Francisco, but made no trouble, or only with Mrs. McGinnis, who had sold the Heart of Ireland and invested the money in a laundry, thinking McGinnis dead.
Hank married his girl quite recently and Candon and Tommie are happy, but the thing uppermost in George’s mind in connection with this business was the treasure.
He took an old press cutting from his pocket book and showed it to me. It gave news of a boatful of dead Chinamen found and sunk by the British cruiser Hesperia down by the Galapagos Islands.
“They’d have sunk it maybe with a shell,” said George; “it would have given them fine target practice for one of their small guns and they’d never have overhauled it for jewelry.