“Patsy, querida, give me the letter,” eagerly begged Dolores, who as usual had played the silent but always avidly interested listener. “I would read it for you.”
“Why, that’s so! I forgot all about your being Spanish, Dolores,” smiled Patsy.
“Let Dolores read it,” urged Mabel. “She can make a much better translation of it than I.”
“Go ahead, Dolores,” Patsy handed her the letter. Eleanor and Bee also echoed the request.
Shyly delighted at being thus importuned by the girls she so greatly loved and admired, Dolores took the letter and scanned it with knitted brows:
“‘Mi querido hijo,’” she read aloud. “That means, ‘My dear son.’ I will not read more of this in the Spanish, but try to tell you of it in the English as I read it in my own language. This it says:
“‘It is long since I have written to you. I have waited for you to come to me, but you have not come. I grow old and but last month I received the wound in the side from an accursed English captain whose ship we set upon and captured. But he paid dearly for this outrage to my person. We put him and all on board to the torture.
“‘But my wound heals not and promises yet to prove my death. Therefore I charge you to continue to search for the treasure which the accursed English brought ashore and buried on the morning when my galleon fought them and caused their destruction. You know well how we hunted down those who concealed the treasure and put them to torture. Stubborn pigs that they were, they perished, unconfessed.
“‘Since that time I have searched long and frequently for this box which I doubt not to be filled with gold. I have wasted many hours over the stupid book, but understand not at all. Neither dare I give it to any who have knowledge of English lest the secret hiding place of the treasure thus become known to him who reads.
“‘Therefore I charge you to come to me soon in order that I may deliver this book into your hands with such instructions as I have for you. For I am unable to come to you. When I shall have passed out of this life and into the eternal darkness, as I must surely do, since I have no belief in life after death, cease not to search for the treasure. From His Majesty I have received full title to the portion of land we marked off for our own. Thus it becomes yours when I have finished with it. Delay not, but come speedily if you would see your father once more.