"Quite true. Do you suppose I wouldn't go to the municipal library and see? You'll find it in all the history books, just as he says there—the local tradition about the discovery of Madeira."
"And you yourself are Robert Matcham!" I murmured.
All the excitement was on my side. Except for his single outcry, with the vivid flash of color it had lent, he betrayed none. "Have you chanced to examine the coin yourself?" he asked in his level voice.
I felt a kind of anger against him, that any chap with such a yarn should take such an indifferent way to spin it; and presently plucking out the doubloon and holding it under the lights, I came to the crowning wonder of all.
It was a rude bit of coinage, in size and weight considerably better than a double eagle, of a metal too soft to have long withstood the direct friction of the waves. An incrusted discoloration gave me a hint that it must have lain well bedded down; the bright scratches told what recent battering it had suffered on the rocks. On the reverse I made out a coat of arms, almost obliterated; but the obverse was clearer. It bore a profile head, with the titles of Fernando I, King of Portugal, and under that—the date.
"Thirteen-seventy," I read; and repeated aloud with a gasp: "Thirteen-seventy! Why—that's the very year!"
He nodded slowly.
"Do you realize what this means?" I cried at him. "In the same year this piece was minted a man of your own name set sail from England and was lost on these shores!... It might easily have come with him—the ship was Spanish. It probably did come with him! He may have owned this gold; he may have held it, clinked it, gambled with it! And now to be flung up out of the wreck, more than five hundred years afterward, not for the first comer to find, not for just anybody, but for you—at your feet! Do you get that?"
"It figures out to fifteen generations, doesn't it?" was all the answer he made.
"And the place—the place! The book says they still call it Machico. Was it there—is it possible it was there you found the coin?"