Edgar interrupted me impatiently.
“I have not overlooked him,” he said. “He is a Jamaica negro of gigantic proportions, or the ship’s cook; but he always gets his too, and he gets it good. They throw him to the sharks! Then we all camp out on a desert island inhabited only by goats, and we build a stockade, and the mutineers come to treat with us under a white flag, and we, trusting entirely to their honor, are fools enough to go out and talk with them. At which they shoot us up, and withdraw laughing scornfully.” Edgar fixed his eye-glasses upon me accusingly.
“Am I right, or am I wrong?” he demanded. I was unable to answer.
“The only man,” continued Edgar warmly, “who ever showed the slightest intelligence in the matter was the fellow in the ‘Gold Bug’. He kept his mouth shut. He never let any one know that he was after buried treasure, until he found it. That’s me! Now I know exactly where this treasure is, and——”
I suppose, involuntarily, I must have given a start of interest; for Edgar paused and shook his head, slyly and cunningly. “And if you think I have the map on my person now,” he declared in triumph, “you’ll have to guess again!”
“Really,” I protested, “I had no intention——”
“Not you, perhaps,” said Edgar grudgingly; “but your Japanese valet conceals himself behind those curtains, follows me home, and at night——”
“I haven’t got a valet,” I objected.
Edgar merely smiled with the most aggravating self-sufficiency. “It makes no difference,” he declared. “No one will ever find that map, or see that map, or know where that treasure is, until I point to the spot.”
“Your caution is admirable,” I said; “but what,” I jeered, “makes you think you can point to the spot, because your map says something like, ‘Through the Sunken Valley to Witch’s Caldron, four points N. by N. E. to Gallows Hill where the shadow falls at sunrise, fifty fathoms west, fifty paces north as the crow flies, to the Seven Wells’? How the deuce,” I demanded, “is any one going to point to that spot?”