The Pirate of Panama | Page 3

heart leaped like an unleashed foxhound taking the trail. What could it mean but treasure? What had happened to the Santa Theresa? Had some one helped Lobardi to "croke" by cracking his skull? Could that dim, red ink once have been, the life blood in a man's veins?
Here was food enough to fire the blood of a cool-headed Yankee, let alone that of a mad Irishman. I caught a vision of a boatload of red-turbaned buccaneers swarming up the side of a brig; saw the swish of cutlases and the bellying smoke of pistols; beheld the strangely garbed seadogs gathered around an open chest of yellow gold bars shining in the sun.
For an eyebeat it was all clear to me as day. Then I laughed aloud at myself in returning sanity. I was in the twentieth century, not the eighteenth. An imagination so vivid that it read all this from a scrap of paper picked from the gutter needed curbing. I repocketed the chart and went to lunch.
But I found I could not laugh myself out of my interest. The mystery of it drew me, despite myself. While I waited for my chop I had the map out again, studying it as a schoolboy does a paper-backed novel behind his geography.
Beneath the map were some closely written lines of directions for finding "itte," whatever that might be. As to that my guess never wavered.
Whoever had drawn the map had called the peninsula "Doubloon Spit." Why? Clearly because he and his fellow buccaneers had buried there the ill-gotten treasure they had gained from piracy. No doubt the Santa Theresa was a gold ship they had waylaid and sunk.
At my entrance I had taken a little side table, but the restaurant was filling rapidly. A man stopped beside my table and took off a frogged overcoat with astrakhan trimmings. He hung this and his hat on a rack and sat down in the chair opposite me.
Instinctively I had covered the map with a newspaper. With amazement I now discovered that my vis-à-vis was the villain of the Adventure of the Young Lady and the Chart, as the author of the "New Arabian Nights" would have phrased it.
The man was in a vile humor, so much could be seen at a glance. Without doing me the honor of a single glance he stared moodily in front of him, his heavy black brows knit to a grim frown.
He was a splendid specimen of physical manhood, big and well-muscled, with a broad, flat back and soldierly carriage. That he was a leader of men was an easy deduction, though the thin, straight mouth and the hard glitter in the black eyes made the claim that he would never lead toward altruism.
In quick, short puffs he smoked a cigarette, and as soon as he had finished it he lit a second. Men all around us were waiting their turn, but I observed that the first lift of his finger brought an attendant.
"Tenderloin with mushrooms--asparagus tips--strong black coffee--cognac," he ordered with the curtness of an army officer snapping commands at a trooper. His voice was rich and cultivated, but had a very distinctly foreign quality in spite of the fact that his English was faultless.
I took advantage of the distraction of the waiter's presence to slip the map from the table into my pocket. After this I breathed freer, for it is scarcely necessary to say that in the struggle for the map--and by this time I had quite made up my mind that there would be fought out a campaign for its possession--I was wholly on the side of the young woman.
But as yet I knew none of the facts, and so was not in a position to engage with him to advantage. I called for the check and took my coat and hat from the rack.
Then I made my first mistake. I should have carried my raincoat to the door before putting it on. As I buttoned it recognition began to struggle faintly into his eyes. I waited for no further developments.
But as I went out of the door I could see him hurrying forward. Instantly I turned to the right, dodged into a tobacco shop, ran swiftly through it to the surprise of the proprietor, and found myself in an alley. I took this in double-quick time and presently had lost myself in the hurrying crowds on Kearney Street. Five minutes later I was in the elevator on the way to our office.
I set to work resolutely, but my drifting thoughts went back to the military man with the frogged coat, to the distractingly pretty girl who did not want him to have the map, and to that spit of land lapped by Pacific waves in a latitude and longitude that shall be nameless