“What sort of treasure?”

“Why, as to that, ma’am, it varies with the story.  Sometimes ’tis bar silver from the isthmus, and sometimes ’tis gold plate and bullion that belonged to the old Kings of Mexico; but by the tale I’ve heard offtenest, ’tis church treasure that was run away with by a shipful of logwoodmen in Campeachy Bay.  But there again you no sooner fix it as church treasure, and ask where it came from, than you have to choose between half a dozen different accounts.  Some say from the Spanish islands—­Havana for choice; others from the Main, and I’ve heard places mentioned as far apart us Vera Cruz and Caracas.  The dates, too—­if you can call them dates at all—­vary just as surprisingly.”

“The date on this chart is 1776,” said Miss Belcher, who had been peering at it while the Captain spoke.

“Then, supposing there’s something in poor Coffin’s secret, that gives you the year to start from.  We’ll suppose this is the very chart used by the man who hid the treasure.  Then it follows the treasure wasn’t hidden before 1776, and that rules out all the yarns about Hornigold, Teach, Bat Roberts, and suchlike pirates, the last of whom must have been hanged a good fifty years before:  though here’s evidence”—­Captain Branscome laid a forefinger on the chart—­ “that these gentry had dealings with the island in their day.  ‘Gow’s Gulf,’ ’Cape Fea’—­Gow was a pirate and a hard nut at that; and Fea, if I remember, his lieutenant or something of the sort; but they had gone their ways before ever this was printed, and consequently before ever these crosses came to be written on it.  You follow me, ma’am?”

Miss Belcher gave a contemptuous sniff which, I doubt not, would have prefaced the remark that an unweaned child would arrive unaided at the same conclusions; but here I interposed.

“Captain Coffin,” said I, “told me that a part of the treasure was church plate, and that he had seen it.  He showed me a coin, too, and said it came from the island.”

“Hey, lad?  What sort of coin?”

But to this I could give no answer, except that it was a piece of gold, and in size perhaps a trifle smaller than a guinea.

“That’s a pity, lad.  The coin might have helped us.  You’re sure now that you can’t remember?  It hadn’t a couple of pillars engraved on it, for instance?”

I shook my head.  I had taken no particular heed of the stamp on the coin.

Captain Branscome sighed his disappointment.

“The church plate don’t help us at all,” he said, “or very little.  Why, I’ve heard this Honduras treasure dated so far back as Morgan’s time, when he sacked Panama.  The tale went that the priests at Panama or Chagres, or one of those places, on fright of Morgan’s coming, clapped all their treasure aboard ship under a guard of militia—­soldiers of some sort, anyway—­and that the seamen cut the soldiers’ throats, slipped cable, and away-to-go.  But Morgan!  He must have died before Queen Anne was born—­well, not so far back as that maybe, but then or thenabouts.  I tell you, ma’am, this story hangs around every port and every room where seamen gather and drink and take their ways again.  ’Tis for all the world like the smell of tobacco-smoke, that tells you some one has come and gone, but leaves you nothing to get hold of.  Hallo!—­”