"Oh, I've been afraid plenty of times," says Rupert, "but somehow I--
Well, I've gone on."

"Isn't he splendid?" asks Mrs. Mumford, turnin' to us. "Just like a
hero in a book! But we would like to know from the very beginning. As
a boy, now?"

"There wasn't much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little
town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help
in it--sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I
hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old
boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate
books. I wanted to go to sea."

"So you ran away and became a sailor," adds Mrs. Mumford, clappin' her
hands enthusiastic.

"I planned to lots of times," says Rupert, "but father made me go
through the academy. Then afterwards I had to teach school--in a rough
district. Once some big boys tried to throw me into a snowdrift. We
had a terrible fight."

"It must have been awful," says Mrs. Mumford. "Those big, brutal boys!
I can just see them. Did--did you kill any of them?"

"I hit one on the nose quite hard," says Rupert. "Then, of course, I
had to give up teaching. I meant to start off for sea that winter, but
father was taken sick. Lungs, you know. So we sold out the store and
bought a place down in Florida, an orange grove. It was on the west
coast, near the Gulf.

"That's where I learned to sail. And after father died I took my share
of what he left us and bought a cruising boat. I didn't like working
on the grove--messing around with smelly fertilizer, sawing off dead
limbs, doing all that silly spraying. And my brother Jim could do it
so much better. So I fished and took out winter tourists on
excursions: things like that. Summers I'd go cruising down the coast.
I would be gone for weeks at a time. I've been out in some fearful
storms, too.

"I got to know a lot of strange characters who live on those west coast
keys. They're bad, some of them--kill you for a few dollars. Others
are real friendly, like the old fellow who told me about the buried
treasure. He was almost dead of fever when I found him in his little
palmetto shack. I got medicine for him, stayed until he was well.
That's why he told me about the gold."

"Think of that!" says Mrs. Mumford. "He had been a pirate himself,
hadn't he?"

"Well, hardly," says Rupert. "A tinsmith, I think he told me. He was
a tough old citizen, though--an