Lying on the table was a piece of an old newspaper in which Jack had wrapped something. Ladds saw Colquhoun mechanically take up the paper, read it, and change color. Then he looked straight before him, seeing nothing, and Ladds stopped speaking. Then he smiled in a strange far-off way.
"I think I will go with you," he said.
"Hear, hear!" cried Jack. "Selkirk returns to the sound of the church-going bell."
Ladds refrained from looking at the paper in search of things which did not concern himself, but he perceived that Colquhoun had, like Hamlet, seen something. There was, in fact, an announcement in the fragment which greatly interested Lawrence Colquhoun:
"On April 3, by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Turk's Island, at St. George's Hanover Square, Gabriel Cassilis, of etc., to Victoria, daughter of the Late Admiral Sir Benbow Pengelley, K.C.B."
In the morning they started, Mr. Beck being provided with a new rig-out of a rough and useful kind.
At the last moment one of the Chinamen, Leeching, the cook, besought from his late master, as a parting favour and for the purpose of self-protection, the gift of a pistol, powder, and ball.
Mr. Colquhoun gave them to him, thinking it a small thing after two years of faithful service. Then Leeching, after loading his pistol, went to work with his comrade for an hour or so.
Presently, Achow being on his knees in the shingle, the perfidious Leeching suddenly cocked his pistol, and fired it into Achow's right ear, so that he fell dead.
By this lucky accident Leeching became sole possessor of the little pile of gold which he and the defunct Achow had scraped together and placed in a cache.