t of his
purpose.

"So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the
eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze--it's a
hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to one that no
human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got to do is keep her
heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long.
There will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon
on that; and then--"

The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature
of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it.
Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more
like polished stones than living tissue.

"And then what?" he asked.

"And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!"

Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a
hoarse bass.

"And you believe he has all that plunder by him?" asked Ricardo, rather
perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when
looked at all round by his acute mind.

Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.

"How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this
hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?"

Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:

"Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better
information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect?
But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?"

Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a
man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business
to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a
sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He
defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of
that villainous Swede.

"What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to guide
almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer
by?"

These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared.
The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs.