this, and I'm with
you," Remington had replied.

It was at this stage that Thalassa was seized with an inclination to
thrust himself into the dialogue. Striving to explain his reasons at that
distance of time, he said it was Robert Turold's last remark which really
decided him--did the trick, as he phrased it. Actually it must have been a
prompt recognition of the kinship between two lawless souls.

He left his seat and went across to where the two young Englishmen were
earnestly talking, unaware that they had been overheard. He approached
them as one shipwrecked sailor might approach two other castaways marooned
on the same rock. They all wanted money, and they all wanted to get away
from that God-forsaken hole. Diamonds they were after? Well, he could take
them to a place at the other end of the world where there were enough
diamonds in the rough to make them all rich for life.

After the first surprise at his interruption they heard him in silence,
and then plied him with questions. Where were these diamonds? In a
volcanic island in the South Pacific. Where about? They couldn't expect
him to tell them that. It was Robert Turold (Thalassa seemed to have
addressed himself principally to him) who asked him how he knew that the
diamonds were still there. Thalassa's reply was that they were buried in a
big box, and the island was out of the run of ships. What sort of a big
box? Turold had asked. Thalassa replied (perhaps reluctantly) that the box
was "a kind of a coffin," and that there was a dead man inside of it as
well as the diamonds, but he, at all events, was not likely to run off
with them.

Remington and Turold were startled by this answer, and conferred hastily
apart. They returned to ask more questions. They wanted to know how the
body and the diamonds had got there in the first instance, but that was a
story which Thalassa refused to reveal. That had nothing to do with it, he
said. The ship which had buried the man there had gone down afterwards
with all hands, so nobody knew about the diamonds except him.

After that Remington became the chief questioner, Robert Turold merely
looking on, his dark eyes frequently meeting Thalassa's. It seemed as
though he must have realized that these last replies concealed a story
better left unprobed. But Remington wanted to know why Thalassa had come
searching for diamonds in that part of the world when he knew of plenty in
another, and Thalassa had replied, in all simpl