Pieces of Eight | Page 7

can be found without difficulty. Short Shrift Island is a place where
passing vessels stop to get fresh water. No great distance from Nassau,
so it can be easily found.
"The first pod was taken from a Spanish merchant and it is in Spanish
silver dollars.
"The other on Short Shrift Island is in different kinds of money, taken
from different ships of different nations--it is all good money.
"Now friends, I have told you all that is necessary for you to know, to
recover these treasures and I leave it in your hands and it is my request
that when you read this, you will at once take steps to recover it, and
when you get it, it is my wish that you use it in a way most good for
yourself and others. This is all I ask.
"Now thanking you for your kindness and care and with my best wishes
for your prosperity and happiness, I will close, as I am so weak I can
hardly hold the pen.
"I am, truly your friend,
HENRY P. TOBIAS.
"Henry P. Tobias?" said Charlie Webster. "Never heard of him. Did
you, John?"
"Never!"
And then there was a stir in the outer office. Some one was asking for
the Secretary of the Treasury. So John rose.
"I must get to work now, boys. We can talk it over to-night." And then,
handing me the manuscript: "Take it home with you, if you like, and
look it over at your leisure."

As Charlie Webster and I passed out into the street, I noticed the fellow
of the sinister pock-marked visage standing near the window of the
inner office. The window was open, and any one standing outside,
could easily have heard everything that passed inside. As the fellow
caught my eye, he smiled unpleasantly, and slunk off down the street.
"Who is that fellow?" I asked Charlie. "He's a queer looking specimen."
"Yes! he's no good. Yet he's more half-witted than bad, perhaps. His
face is against him, poor devil."
And we went our ways, till the evening, I to post home to the further
study of the narrative. There seated on the pleasant veranda, I went
over it carefully, sentence by sentence. While I was reading, some one
called me indoors. I put down the manuscript on the little bamboo table
at my side, and went in. When I returned, a few moments afterward, the
manuscript was gone!
CHAPTER III
In Which I Charter the "Maggie Darling."
As luck would have it, the loss, or rather the theft, of Henry P. Tobias's
narrative, was not so serious as it at first seemed, for it fortunately
chanced that John Saunders had had it copied; but the theft remained
none the less mysterious. What could be the motive of the thief with
whom--quite unreasonably and doubtless unjustly--my fancy persisted
in connecting that unprepossessing face so keenly attentive in John
Saunders's outer office, and again so plainly eavesdropping at his open
window.
However, leaving that mystery for later solution, John Saunders,
Charlie Webster, and I spent the next evening in a general and
particular criticism of the narrative itself. There were several obvious
objections to be made against its authenticity. To start with, Tobias, at
the time of his deposition, was an old man--seventy-five years old--and
it was more than probable that his experiences as a pirate would date
from his early manhood; they were hardly likely to have taken place as

late as his fortieth year. The narrative, indeed, suggested their taking
place much earlier, and there would thus be a space of at least forty
years between the burial of the treasure and his deathbed revelation. It
was natural to ask: Why during all those years, did he not return and
retrieve the treasure for himself? Various circumstances may have
prevented him, the inability from lack of means to make the journey, or
what not; but certainly one would need to imagine circumstances of
peculiar power that should be strong enough to keep a man with so
valuable a secret in his possession so many years from taking
advantage of it.
For a long while too the names given to the purported sites of the
treasure caches puzzled us. Modern maps give no such places as "Dead
Men's Shoes" and "Short Shrift Island," but John--who is said to be
writing a learned history of the Bahamas--has been for a long time
collecting old maps, prints, and documents relating to them; and at last,
in a map dating back to 1763, we came upon one of the two names. So
far the veracity of Tobias was supported. "Dead Men's Shoes" proved
to be the old name for a certain cay some twenty miles long, about a
day and a half's sail from Nassau,