had taken
the best apartments in the hotel. The captain had requested this, for he
did not know how long they might remain there, and he wanted them to have
every comfort. He had sent them as much money as he could spare from the
sale, in Lima, of the gold he had carried with him when lie first left
the caves, but his expenses in hiring ships and buying guano were heavy.
Edna, however, had received frequent remittances while the captain was at
the Rackbirds' cove, through an agent in San Francisco. These, she
supposed, came from further sales of gold, but, in fact, they had come
from the sale of investments which the captain had made in the course of
his fairly successful maritime career. In his last letter from Lima he
had urged them all to live well on what he sent them, considering it as
their share of the first division of the treasure in the mound. If his
intended projects should succeed, the fortunes of all of them would be
reconstructed upon a new basis as solid and as grand as any of them had
ever had reason to hope for. But if he should fail, they, the party in
San Francisco, would be as well off, or, perhaps, better circumstanced
than when they had started for Valparaiso. He did not mention the fact
that he himself would be poorer, for he had lost the _Castor_, in which
he was part-owner, and had invested nearly all his share of the proceeds
of the sale of the gold in ship hire, guano purchases, and other
necessary expenses.

Edna was waiting in San Francisco to know what would be the next scene in
the new drama of her life. Captain Horn had written before he sailed from
Lima in the Chilian schooner for the guano islands and the Rackbirds'
cove, and he had, to some extent, described his plans for carrying away
treasure from the mound; but since that she had not heard from him until
about ten days before, when he wrote from Acapulco, where he had arrived
in safety with his bags of guano and their auriferous enrichments. He had
written in high spirits, and had sent her a draft on San Francisco so
large in amount that it had fairly startled her, for he wrote that he had
merely disposed of some of the gold he had brought in his baggage, and
had not yet done anything with that contained in the guano-bags. He had
hired a storehouse, as if he were going regularly into business, and from
which he would dispose of his stock of guano after he had restored it to
its original condition. To do all this, and to convert the