“Then I am a well man, as spry as a tarantula,” sputtered Ramon Bazán. “Have you a master’s license, Ricardo? It will concern the insurance on my steamer. I can’t afford to risk heavy loss. All the money I can scrape together will be in this voyage.”
“Yes, I hold a master’s ticket. And I’m fed up with twiddling my thumbs, so let’s go to it. What do you say?”
“But I can’t turn the ship over to you until she is ready to go to sea, at the very last minute,” lamented the owner. “You will have to be sneaked on board at night and hidden until the steamer is ready to sail, or the Colombians in the crew will jump over the side. One look at El Tigre Grande and—adios! Ten hundred things have I had on my hands to arrange, and do you wonder at my bad heart kicking a flip-flop?”
“I shall pray for your health, believe me,” devoutly returned the nervous young mariner. “Now about this steamer—”
“She is very awful to look at,” was the frank admission. “A German tramp that was interned four years at Cartagena! I bought her cheap, Ricardo. Rusty and afflicted with heart disease and other things, she will not sink if the weather is kind. But you yourself could never make the mistake of thinking she was the Tarragona. I have found a crew for my shabby harlot of a Valkyrie. Not such men as you will love, Ricardo, for I must take what I find. They must hear not a whisper of Cocos Island. It is a trading voyage to the west coast. The ship will clear for Buenaventura, a Pacific port of Colombia.”
“We’ll drive that condemned old crock along somehow,” cheerfully responded Richard Cary. “When do we sail?”
“A few days more, my captain. A little coal to put in and boiler tubes to be plugged. Coal is cheaper at Balboa. We can fill the bunkers there. As Heaven hears my voice, Ricardo, unless we find the treasure this voyage will ruin poor old Ramon Bazán.”
The interview had taken a turn that was not good for a damaged heart. The owner of the Valkyrie was growing excited. Cary thought it best to let the details rest. The old gentleman’s health interested him enormously. It was like carrying a basket of eggs along a very rough road.
The breakable Papa Bazán insisted on getting into his clothes next morning and seemed little the worse for wear. It was quite apparent that he had not been running around in aimless circles while preparing for his romantic voyage. He was amazingly capable of getting what he wanted, and without the eternal delays of his native clime. Those who now did business with him found his pertinacity as vexing as the itch.
The Valkyrie was a small vessel, of nine hundred tons, which had flown the German flag in the coasting trade of Colombia and Venezuela until gripped by the greedy hand of war. Corroded and blistering, a sad orphan of the sea, she had slumbered at an anchor chain in the lagoon of Cartagena until rashly purchased by Ramon Bazán after a season of dickering and bickering to make a New England horse-trader jealous. When he found how much repair work was unavoidable, his heart almost stopped forever. What made it beat again was the stimulus, more potent than capsules, of the six millions of treasure of the brig Mary Dear, besides those seven hundred and thirty-three gold ingots piled in the cave by the arithmetical Benito Bonito.