"You were certainly justified in backing the thing for all you were worth," I answered lamely.
"I see I may have to punch your head after all." He smiled quietly. "I've no skill to show you how it struck me; that's the trouble."
He reached into his pocket again and this time brought out and flattened carefully before him, with his powerful, deliberate hands, a little red-bound pamphlet. "Then let me show you what I'd been reading along the way."
I took the pamphlet from him with expectation at low ebb. It was the guidebook to Madeira, a product of the local printer, I judged, thrown together to catch the coppers of the tourist trade. I took it, I say, rather skeptically, and glanced down the page to which he had folded; but before I had scanned the half a shock went through me. My incredulity vanished like mist in a wind. For here is what I read:
As for the dixovery of this lovely Island of Maderia, which is indeed a glorious pearl in the sea, it was probable in 1370; but not by the Portuguese, which come much later. The first was dixovered by sad accident by a lovely, oldest legend, by an Englishman named Robin à Machin, Roberto Machim, or Robert Matcham. He was brave lover of a too beautiful woman to describe, named Anna d'Arfet, his dear love, which he could not marry because the enterprise was not recommended by the patrons.
Hizory teaches us these two evaded together to establish in France and took shipment with a pilot captain friend named Pedro Morales, who was great fighting pilot of Spain. They delivered free on board and everything of best description, until the ship ran against a storm, which was indeed terrible. Many days they blow where the Pilots could not say; and after varied assortment of trouble they came against this strange shore of Maderia and all wrecked. So perished in each others arms this famous love story, which are indeed a sad and lovely legend.
The pilot Pedro Morales exaped and went away to Portugal, where he told the King about this Island. So it was dixovered again by a navigator for the King, and always the populations since named the place Machico, after Robert Matcham and Anna d'Arfet, which died together on the shore.
I had no least desire left to laugh when I had finished, not even to smile at the method of the quaint chronicler through whose commercial phrase there penetrated such a heroic gusto of sentiment. Again and more subtly, more alluringly, I felt the presence of that valid marvel, the delightful fantasy of truth, for which no man ever quite outgrows the yearning. It was here, under my hand....
"Where did you get this?" I demanded.
"Bought it from a hawker on the streets. Everybody buys 'em. They tell you the price of hammocks and seats in the theater and where to get sugarcane brandy and 'article of native indus'ry.'"
"But it is true?"