Pieces of Eight | Page 7

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, one of the long string of coral islands now known as the "Exuma Cays." But of "Short Shrift Island" we sought in vain for a trace.
Then the details for identification of the sites left something to be desired in particularity. But that, I reasoned, rather made for Tobias's veracity than otherwise. Were the document merely a hoax, as John continued to suspect, its author would have indulged his imagination in greater elaboration. The very simplicity of the directions argued their authenticity. Charlie Webster was inclined to back me in this view, but neither of my friends showed any optimism in regard to the possible discovery of the treasure.
The character of the brush on the out-islands alone, they said, made the task of search well nigh hopeless. To cut one's way through twenty miles of such stubborn thickets, would cost almost as much in labour as the treasure was worth. And then the peculiar nature of the jagged coral rock, like endless wastes of clinker, almost denuded of earth, would make the