“Ah, yes, you have. It is not usual for people to go armed in these times. The days of Morgan, the rover, and Kidd, the buccaneer, are long past; yet we are seen emulating them.”
Frank and Wade were speechless. They could do nothing but stare at the speaker.
He smiled in his saturnine way.
“Fear not,” he said, in his cool, almost impudent way. “I have not entrapped you, nor decoyed you on board this yacht for any nefarious purpose. Your statement that you were the possessor of a submarine boat has interested me, and I have a remarkable proposition to make. But first to my story:
“I am a native of Sicily, though an American by extraction, that is, I was born in that island, of Yankee parents. I was some years ago the possessor of a large fortune, but Monte Carlo and a fast life soon dissipated it.
“I had a half-brother, by name Alfonso, my father having married a Spanish lady. We were never good friends. We quarreled at every available opportunity.
“Despite this, Alfonso came to me when we were both penniless and begging for alms in Naples. He was a rogue, was Alfonso, but had no head for scheming. He assured me that he was on the track of a fortune.
“He produced a tin box, containing an ancient chart which had been an heirloom in his mother’s family. It was a map of an isle in the sea and described the location of a buried treasure upon that isle. Millions in Peruvian gold had been buried there by a buccaneering ancestor. But, alas! the latitude and longitude was so obscurely marked that it could not be deciphered.
“If there was any way to make that out, then the location of the treasure might be established and a fortune reaped. Alfonso had great faith in my sagacity, and deemed it possible that I might accomplish what others had failed to do. So he brought the charts to me.
“And he was right. I puzzled over the figures for a long time. Then I experimented with chemicals. I at length found a certain one which, by soaking the vellum, raised the obliterated figures and made them perceptible to the eye. By studying the map I learned that the gold was buried upon the Isle of Mona, in the Channel of Yucatan.