“I don’t say that a ship, once out of sight, cannot be made away with—­though even that, with a crew to tell tales, has beaten some of the cleverest heads; but to take out a ship and fill her up with treasure, and bring her home and unload her without any one’s knowing—­that’s a feat that (if you’ll excuse me) I’ve heard a hundred liars discuss at one time and another; and one has said it can be done in this way, and another in that, but never a one in my hearing has found a way that would deceive a child.”

“Yet you said, a moment since, that Miss Plinlimmon had given the sense of it?”

“I did, ma’am.  I am saying that to fetch this treasure will be difficult, even if we find it—­”

“You don’t doubt its existence?”

“I do not, ma’am.  I doubt it so little, ma’am, that I would ten times sooner engage to find than to fetch it.  But I don’t even despair of fetching it, if the lady goes on being as clever as she has begun.”

“What?” exclaimed Plinny.  “I?  Clever?”

“Yes, indeed, ma’am,” Captain Branscome answered, still in a slow, measured voice.  “But, indeed, too, I might have been prepared for it when you started by taking a line that beats all my experience of landsmen; or perhaps in this case I ought to say lands_ladies_.”

“Why, what have I done that is wonderful?”

“You took the line, ma’am, that, from here to Honduras, what is it but a passage?  A few months at the most—­oh, to be sure, to a seaman that’s no more than nature; but to hear it from any one land-bred, and a lady too!  As a Christian man, I have believed in miracles, but to-day I seem to be moving among them.  And after your saying that, I had no call to be surprised when you up and suggested a way that would have taken a seaman twenty years to hit upon!  I am not talking about the ship, ma’am.  That part of your plan (if you’ll allow me, as a seaman, to give an opinion) won’t work at all.  But the plan in general is a masterpiece.”

“But I do not see,” Plinny confessed, with a small puckering of the brows, “that I have suggested anything that can be called a plan.”

“Why, ma’am, you have been talking heavenliest common sense, and once you’ve started us upon common sense there’s no such thing as a difficulty.  ‘Let us go to the island,’ you said; and with that at a stroke you get rid of the worst danger we have to fear, which is suspicion.  For who’s to suspect such a company as this present, or any part of it, of being after treasure?  ’Let us make it a pleasure trip,’ said you, or words to that effect; and what follows but that the whole journey is made cheap and simple?  We book our passages in the Kingston packet.  Peace has been declared with France, and what more natural than that a party of English should be travelling to see the West Indies?  Or what more likely than that, after what has happened, the doctor has advised a sea-voyage, to soothe your mind?  As for me, I am Harry’s tutor; every one in Falmouth knows it, and thinks me lucky to get the billet.  It won’t take five minutes to explain Mr. Goodfellow here, just as easily—­”