“After wandering up and down the earth for forty years, Anson finally ‘struck it rich,’ and am I, who was to profit by his good fortune, and the son whom I love more than I do anything else on earth, to lose this treasure after all?”
He fell back upon the raft, and the exertion set the wound in his head to bleeding again. A dark stream appeared beneath the bandage and trickled down his forehead, while he lay, gasping for breath, upon the bit of sailcloth which served him for a bed.
“What did you do with the diamonds?” the mate asked, when the dying man had again become calm.
“I—I have written a letter to Brandon, telling him all about it,” gasped the captain. “That is what I wrote the second day we were on the raft. I dared not take them with me from the brig, and they are hidden in the cabin. I know now that we made a grave mistake in leaving the Silver Swan at all, for she may hold together for months.
“Take—take the papers from my pocket, Cale,” he added, feebly unbuttoning his coat, “and keep them. If you are saved I charge you to give them to Brandon with your own hands, and I can trust you to assist him in every possible way to recover his fortune, should such a thing be possible.”
The mate bent over the unfortunate owner of the Silver Swan, and with trembling hands removed several thick documents from his pocket and thrust them into the breast of his flannel shirt.
As he did so and turned again, he saw the scowling visage of Jim Leroyd peering at them above his chest. Quick as a flash he seized his pistol and aimed it at the sailor; but Leroyd dodged out of view at once. Without doubt, however, he had seen the papers passed from the captain to mate Wetherbee.
“Take good care of them, Cale,” whispered Captain Tarr. “And let nobody else see them. I believe that Leroyd suspected something back there at Cape Town, for he came into the cabin on an errand just as that friend of poor Anson gave the package into my hands, and I caught him snooping about the companionway several times afterward. It was he I feared most when we left the brig, and therefore dared not take the diamonds with me.”
“I’ll shoot him yet,” muttered the old seaman fiercely, with his weather eye cocked over the top of the chest. “I hated the sight o’ that fellow when he first boarded the brig at New York. His face is enough to bring bad luck to any ship.”
But the captain was not listening to him. He had floated away into a restless slumber, from which he only awoke once to whisper, “Remember, Cale!” and then passed into a dreamless sleep from which there could be no awakening in this world.