‘I can’t help that,’ he cried with a hint of ferocity in his manner. ‘There’s this here fortune to be recovered first. After we’ve got it, home won’t be fur off.’
Come, thought I, I must be cool and apparently careless.
‘It is very good of you, Captain Braine, to wish me to participate in this treasure; but really, my dear sir, I have no title to any portion of it; besides, I am a man of independent means, and what I possess is quite as much as I require.’
‘Ye’ll not refuse it when ye see it,’ he exclaimed. ‘Money’s money; and in this here world, where money signifies everything,—love, happiness, pleasure, everything you can name—who’s the man that’s agoing to tell me he can get too much of it?’
‘But you haven’t completed your story,’ said I, strenuously endeavouring to look as though I believed in every word of the mad trash he had been communicating.
‘As much as is necessary,’ said he. ‘I want to come to business, sir. I could keep you listening for hours whilst I told ye of our life aboard that island, how the brigantine went to pieces, how one day Mr. Ruddiman went for a swim in the lagoon, and how the cramp or some fit took him, and he sunk with me a-looking on, being no swimmer, and incapable of giving him any help.’
‘And how long were you on the island?’ said I.
‘Four months and three days. It was one morning that I crawled from the little hut we had built ourselves out of some of the brigantine’s wreckage that had drifted ashore, and saw a small man-of-war with her tops’l aback just off the island. She was a Yankee surveying craft, and a boat was coming off when I first see her. They took me aboard, and landed me at Valparaiso two months later. But all that’s got nothing to do with what I want to talk to ye about. I’ve got now to recover this money, and I mean to have it, and you’ll help me to get it, Mr. Dugdale.’
‘But why have you waited all this time before setting about to recover this treasure?’ said I.
‘I never had a chance of doing it afore,’ he replied; ‘but it’s come now, and I don’t mean to lose it.’