cious document, and after a long and
tedious voyage into the Pacific, they cast anchor off Cocos Island.

======================================================================

[Illustration: Treasure-seekers digging on Cocos Island.]

Christian Cruse, the hermit treasure-seeker of Cocos Island.

======================================================================

There the brace of adventurers were rowed ashore, leaving the vessel in
charge of the mate. Captain Thompson's directions were found to be
accurate, and a cave was discovered and in it a dazzling store of
treasure to make an honest sailor-man rub his eyes and stagger in his
tracks. Keating and Bogue decided that the secret must be withheld
from the crew at all hazards, but their excitement betrayed them and
all hands clamored that they must be given shares of the booty.
Keating protested that a division should not be made until they had
returned to their home port and the owner of the ship had been given
the greater part which belonged to him by rights.

A mutiny flared up, and the mate and the men went ashore, leaving
Keating and Bogue marooned on board, but the search was bootless for
lack of directions. They returned to the ship in a very savage temper
indeed and swore to kill the two leaders unless they should tell them
how to find the cave. Promising to show the way on the morrow, Keating
and Bogue slipped ashore in a whale-boat that night, planning to take
all the treasure they could carry and hoping to find opportunity to
secrete it on shipboard.

This program was spoiled by a tragedy. While trying to get back to the
ship through the heavy surf that roared on the beach, the boat was
upset. Bogue, heavily ballasted with treasure, went to the bottom like
a plummet and was seen no more. Keating clung to the water-logged boat
which was caught in a current and carried to sea. Two days later he
was picked up, exhausted almost unto death, by a Spanish schooner which
put him ashore on the coast of Costa Rica. Thence he made his way
overland to the Atlantic, and worked his passage home to Newfoundland
in a trading vessel. His ship returned with never a doubloon among the
mutinous crew.

This experience seemed to have snuffed out the ardor of Keating for
treasure-seeking, and it was as much as twenty years later that he
confided the tale to a townsman named Nicholas Fitzgerald. They talked
about fitting out another ship, but Keating up and