"Now notice how a man is made to look like a monkey on a string. I didn't even know where that tramp was bound till she anchored in the Tagus. The same evening I got caught in a monarchist riot on the Rocio, had the clothes torn off me and landed in a cell. They released me next morning, with handsome apologies and a coat, not so handsome, which they said was mine. It wasn't; mine was gone to rags. But in the lining of the one they gave me I found two Portuguese bills, and something else: a ticket by the Empreza Nacional steamer sailing for Madeira—within the hour! I took it. My word! What else was there to do?
"You'll observe I never was in Madeira before—never meant or wanted to come here; had hardly heard of the isle.
"I landed yesterday; and perhaps you can guess the first thing I did in a place where horses are so plenty and so cheap. Man, I was crazy to get a saddle between my knees again—me that was raised in a saddle. So I hopped aboard the likeliest nag and rode for the open, out the coast—eastward, it seems. Why again should it be eastward? I can't tell you; but it was the way that offered, winding along between the mountains and the sea, where the lava rocks prop the sugar terraces, black and green in layers, and the blue water below....
"Well, I rode on for an hour or more until the path led me down to the very edge of the tide, where I had rough going over a cobbled strand. At a certain place, which I need not describe, the girth slipped and I had to dismount to tighten it. And now, friend, I've brought you into the bit at last; and you can draw your own moral, for it was there, standing almost in the wash, as I was—"
He seemed to hesitate on the phrase.
"You found the doubloon?" I finished for him.
"Winking up at me from the beach like a yellow eye!" he roared, and his big fist crashed upon the table and dropped a silence between us. I sat non-plused.
"Nobody could blame you after that," I said, at length, "for thinking you had a lucky. As you tell it, the whole purpose of your Odyssey was the finding of that pocket piece."
I should have laughed—had I not chanced to meet his clear blue gaze fixed upon me with deadly candor.
"Is such your opinion?" he asked.