birth
and history. Michael will be a rich man one day. In two years his
two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.

But those days when Biatt and I went treasure-ship hunting were not
without their trials. If we had failed, then no more could this
land have been home or resting-place for us. We should only have
been sojourners with no name, in debt, in disgrace, a pair of
braggart adventurers, who had worked a master-man of the island for
a ship, and money and men, and had lost all except the ship! Though
to be sure, the money was not a big thing--a few hundred pounds;
but the ship was no flea-bite. It was a biggish thing, for it could
be rented to carry sugar--it was, in truth, a sugar-ship of four
hundred tons--but it never carried so big a cargo of sugar as it did
on the day when that treasure-box was brought to the surface of the
sea.

I'm bound to say this--one of the straightest men I ever met, liar
withal, was Cassandro Biatt. He took his jewels and vanished up the
seas in a flourish. He would not even have another try at the gold
in the bowels of the ship.

"I've got plenty to fill my paunch, and I'll go while I've enough.
It's the men not going in time that get left in the end"--that's
what he said.

And he was right; for other men went after the gold and got some of
it, and were caught by French and South American pirates and lost
all they had gained. Still another group went and brought away ten
thousand pounds, and lost it in fighting with Spanish buccaneers.
So Biatt was right, and went away content, while I stayed here--
because I must--and bought the land and house where I have my great
sugar-plantation. It is an enterprise of volume, and all would be
well if I were normal in mind and body; but I am not. I have a past
that stinks to heaven, as Shakespeare says, and I am an outlaw of
the one land which has all my soul and name and heritage. Yes, that
is what they have done to me--made a convict, an outlaw of me. I
may live--but not in the British Isles; and if any man kills me, he
is not liable to the law.

Men do not treat me badly here, for I have property and money, and
this is a land where these two things mean more than anywhere else,
even more than in a republic like that where you live. Here men
live according to the law of the knife, fork, and bottle, yet
nowher