“Huh, the only thing to make you talk this way is a girl,” snorted Charlie. “It’s all right, Captain Cary, and you have handled this proposition like a wise guy from start to finish, but the best of us skid. It’s Cocos Island for mine.”
“Well, I think I got what I was looking for,” said Ricardo, with a cryptic twinkle. “I have only one fault to find with Don Miguel O’Donnell. He was born about two hundred years too late. I wish I might have met him, in these same waters, before machine guns were invented.”
“He would have been there with the goods,” heartily replied Charlie.
Captain Cary spent little time ashore after this. Mr. Duff was delighted to take charge of the volunteers who grilled in the sun and made slaves of themselves with pick and shovel. He had been a boss stevedore, among his various employments, and his Spanish vocabulary was like hitting a man with a brick. Tremendously he told them what to do and how to do it. They accomplished prodigies in moving rocks and gravel. He had to admit, however, that it was a job for Charley Burnham’s ingenuity and equipment.
They did find more scattered bullion, blown hither and yon from some undiscovered hiding-place. It handsomely rewarded them for their pains, but made them more than ever dissatisfied. Not a gold ingot had they found. Gold was the word to conjure with. It tormented them. At the end of a week they packed their silver hoard in canvas sacks and weighed it on the scales in the ship’s storeroom. Captain Cary calculated that they had scraped together something like eight thousand dollars’ worth of coins and bullion.
They held a conference. Mr. Panchito, the cheery second mate, addressed them with his arm in a sling. As a compatriot he was able to bombard the crew with an oration. He persuaded them to demand no more than their wages, to be paid them on arrival at Panama. The greater part of the booty was to be entrusted to the chief engineer as the managing director. He would make all the necessary arrangements for a return voyage to Cocos Island.
“Alas, my brave men, we must lose El Capitan Ricardo,” passionately declaimed Mr. Panchito. His eloquence was hampered because one arm was in a sling. “What shall we do without El Tigre Amarillo Grande who conquered Cartagena with an iron bar in his hands, who has conquered this Cocos Island with nothing but his courage in his hands, who has conquered his brave shipmates with the goodness of his heart, who laughs at us naughty children and punishes us when we deserve it. Viva El Capitan! Shout as loud as you can.”
They shouted, and Ricardo blushed. In this manner the finish of the chapter of Cocos Island was written for him. The Valkyrie sailed at daybreak, her engines complaining loudly as she plodded out to sea. Charlie Burnham sat on a stool in the stifling compartment and luridly told the engines what he thought of them. The firemen briskly fed the coal to her and, for once, there was no grumbling. They were rich men and they expected to become vastly richer.
It seemed as though ill omens and misfortune had been left astern. An ocean serenely calm favored the decrepit Valkyrie as she laid a course for Panama. Only one of the wounded men was still confined to a bunk. It was a ship whose people had been welded together in a stanch brotherhood. Nothing could dismay them.
They made light of it when Charlie Burnham sent up word that the crack in the propeller shaft didn’t look any too healthy to him, and he thought he had better tinker with it. Give him a day and he could fit a collar and bolt it on the shaft before it broke clean in two and punched the bottom out of the ship or something like that.