As I turned Pancho into the trail that would bring me to the Ventura road, my mind was busy at a clue that Leandro's parting words had started. "F Y," the letters carved on the chest—somehow they seemed to link up with something in my memory. Who was that Padre of whom Robinson, in his "Life in California," spoke with a good deal of disparagement? The surname initial was surely a "Y," and it seemed to me that San Fernando was the Mission where the depreciated Father dwelt. Yorba, Ybarronda, Ybaez, Ybarra—yes, that was it: Ybarra, sure enough, and the first name was Francisco, it seemed to me; and I felt sure now that it was at San Fernando that Robinson encountered him. All circumstantial evidence, no doubt, but highly interesting. To try another link—did the scraps of writing give any support to my idea? I took out my notebook: unmistakably there were the letters "rra" remaining where naturally the signature would be written. All the rest of the name was gone except a fragment of rubric, but that embellishment again made it plain that the letters were part of a name.
With that I had to be satisfied, both then and now. Matters of more personal importance soon pushed the problem into the back of my mind. Once, indeed, chancing on a copy of the torn inscription, I spent an idle hour in trying to fashion the oddments into a possible connected whole. In case the reader should be interested in such exercises, I will give my tentative solution.
I take the writing, as far as the signature, to have been in Latin, and this is my guesswork rendering: the reader may perhaps improve upon it:—
In hac arca depositi sunt nummi tria millia et quingenti qui pertinent ad hanc Missionem de Sancto Fernando, in cujus finibus ad cautelam ob latrocinia hoc litore a piratis commissa haec arca abscondita est.
Francisco Ybarra.
Oct. 1824.
My chain of guesses, then, is that the old chest that I saw in that house in the Sim' Hills may have once been the personal property of Fray Francisco Ybarra, sometime priest in charge of the Mission of San Fernando. That he, on the approach of some marauders, buried the chest, with the stated sum of money in silver pesos of Carlos III, in some hiding-place about the Mission precincts. That for some unguessable reason the chest was never taken up by the priest or his successors; but that long years afterwards, probably not less than fifty, some party of treasure-seekers (of whom there are evidences of there having been many at that Mission) came upon the buried chest. That it was transported by them to the lonely house in the mountains, some twenty miles distant. That there, a quarrel occurred over the booty, and that the survivor or survivors of the fatal affray, if any there were, did not, for some reason, carry off in their flight all the treasure. The rest of my theory is embodied in the foregoing narrative.
But after all, as to the whole matter, probably there is little to be said that is more to the point than the all-embracing phrase of Leandro, and of Spain and Mexico in general—Quien sabe? Who knows?