"Easily possible. The Grampus is a steel shell, you know, and what takes place aboard of her cannot be seen by any one on the outside. The skipper of the Crescent happened to be a friend of Jurgens', and the Crescent happened to be handily by to pick Jurgens out of the rowboat. We'll know more about that part of it as soon as McMillan investigates and reports. Just now, the point for us to remember is that luck has been with Jurgens. His men captured the submarine, Jurgens captured the paper, and the Crescent, with her skipper and crew, helped Jurgens and his clique to foil the ends of right and justice."
Townsend paused. He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with gray mustache and gray hair, but with alert and piercing black eyes. His looks and manner were such as to inspire confidence, and both Matt and Dick felt that he was to be trusted implicitly.
"But why has Jurgens gone to all this trouble?" inquired Matt. "He has made himself a thief and a fugitive, and what does he hope to gain by it?"
"Ah," returned Townsend, "now you are touching upon the mystery of the Man from Cape Town. I shall have to tell you about that before you can get any clear understanding of what Jurgens has done.
"Nearly a year ago a ragged specimen of a man stopped me at the corner of Broad and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, and asked if I wasn't the man named Townsend who had invented and was then building a new submarine which was to have a cruising radius of several thousand miles. I told him that I was. Thereupon the stranger informed me that he was the Man from Cape Town, and that he wanted to borrow a dollar.
"The Man from Cape Town was very different from your ordinary beggar, and I handed him the dollar. Thereupon he took a folded paper from his coat, gave it to me, and asked me to keep it for him. He declared, gravely enough, that the paper was worth a fortune, and that when my submarine was completed, we would go in her to the place where the fortune had been tucked away, find it and divide it between us.
"That sort of talk led me to look upon the Man from Cape Town as a harmless lunatic. I discovered that the paper was a chart of the Bahama Islands, and that it gave the latitude and longitude of a particular island, together with other information necessary for the finding of what purported to be an iron chest.
"This chart I looked upon as rank moonshine, and tucked it away in a pigeonhole of my desk. Months passed, and I had almost forgotten the Man from Cape Town, his chart and his iron chest, when something occurred to bring the entire matter prominently to my mind.
"A night watchman at the yard where I was building the Grampus found a man going through my desk at midnight. When the fellow was captured, he was just getting away with a paper which he had abstracted from one of the pigeonholes. That paper was the chart, and the would-be thief was—Jurgens, Lattimer Jurgens.
"Jurgens had been a workman in the shipyard, but had been discharged for incompetency. While at the yard I presume he learned, in some manner known only to himself, that I had possession of the chart, that it was in my desk, and that it purported to locate a fortune.