Patsy suddenly stopped reading.
“That’s all!” she exclaimed disappointedly. “It breaks off at ‘We hold’ with a long scrawl of the ‘d’ as though Sir John Holden had been suddenly interrupted.”
“It’s wonderful!” Bee drew a long breath. “While Patsy was reading that last entry I imagined I could see those poor men fleeing for their lives through the jungle. The queer part of it is that it must be true. It’s almost as though this Sir John Holden, who lived three hundred years ago, had suddenly come back and spoken to us.”
“Do you suppose the Spaniards found their hiding place and killed them?” asked Eleanor. “Do let me look at the ending of that last entry, Patsy.”
Patsy handed the open book to Eleanor. Peering over her shoulder, Bee, Dolores and Mabel scrutinized it with her. For a time a lively discussion went on among the five girls concerning the book and the amazing narrative it contained. Its abrupt ending pointed to disaster to the fugitive Englishmen.
“I believe the strong box these men buried was the treasure that old Manuel Fereda spent his life hunting for,” finally asserted Bee. “According to description, the place where they went ashore corresponds to the new moon curve of our bathing beach. Don’t you remember how the north end of the curve runs out to a point? The beach goes deep in above there in another shorter curve that makes a natural harbor. I noticed it the other day when we had the race. We swam just a little way past that point.”
“I remember it now,” Patsy looked up, an almost startled expression in her eyes. “It doesn’t seem possible that all this I’ve been reading about ever happened on the very shore we’ve been using for a bathing beach. If it did happen there, then they buried the treasure somewhere in the woods back of it. How did Manuel come by this journal? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“This journal has been handed down from one generation of Feredas to another,” returned Bee promptly. “What about Camillo de Fereda, the portrait cavalier? Judging from his costume in the picture he must have lived at about the same time as this journal was written. Eulalie told Dolores that he was a pirate and a murderer. He might have been on the very galleon that fought the Dragon. He might have been among the Spaniards who went ashore after Sir John and his men. Maybe the Spaniards found them and killed them all and brought back this book to the galleon. I’ve been trying to figure it out and that’s the way I think it was.”
“It sounds very plausible,” agreed Patsy, much impressed. “Isn’t it maddening to find out this much only to realize that we’ll never know the rest? If there’s a treasure no wonder the Feredas could never find it. All Sir John says about it is that they buried it at the true sign of the Dragon. Now what did he mean by that?”