“No, sar,” broke in Sam, smiling his bright smile. “But Sam will.”
“So that’s how you will spend your share of the treasure?” asked Nicky.
“Part of it,” agreed Sam.
“But you haven’t yet told me how you discovered it,” Mr. Gray said. “You stopped at the point where you failed to bring it up from the burned vessel.”
“Well,” said Nicky, “we ‘worked’ a little voodoo, sort of, didn’t we, fellows?” Tom and Cliff nodded.
“You see, if the treasure wasn’t in the burned boat somebody must have hidden it,” Cliff took up the explanation. “Nicky suggested that we make an experiment. He thought that as long as Don Ortiga declared, up and down, he knew nothing about it, and Senor Ortiga and Mr. Coleson said the same, it might be that somebody else had hidden it during the night. Mr. Coleson, who was sorry for what he had done, tried to help us, and we believed his statement.”
“Yes,” said Tom. “So Nicky got Sam and Jim, the colored boys, and made them tell all they knew, or guessed, about voodoo.”
“He certainly was clever, sar,” broke in Sam. “He found out that we had heard of people ‘divining’ from tricks, and that night we had a voodoo affair on the after deck of the Senorita.”
“Yes,” Cliff took up the tale, “Nicky got Lieutenant Sommerlee to get the sailors and Tew together on the deck, then he and Sam and Jim put on a regular show, making believe they were going to find out who knew about it. They had a smoky fire, and took bits of hair off the heads of the sailors and burned them. Tew acted as though he was afraid of it all—he was superstitious. So he refused to give us his hair and then Sam, here, pretended to slip up behind him and snip some off with a knife. And that made Tew nervous, but what we really burned was some of the other sailors’ hair—only Tew didn’t know that. Then Sam leaped up and pointed to Tew, and said: ‘You know, sar,’ and Tew broke down and showed by his face that he did.
“And do you know where it was?” demanded Nicky, unable to repress himself any longer. “He had waited till they were all asleep, the night before they were caught, and he had dropped the bars, one at a time, into a pool beside the boat. We found them there.