er a paper
with a lot of figures wrote on it, and a drorin' in the middle; and he
used to come for'ard and tell us that you'd been havin' another try to
find out what them figures meant. And one night--it was when we was
gettin' well on toward Sydney--he comes for'ard in great excitement, and
he says, says he, `I'm blowed if the skipper haven't been and found out
at last the meanin' of that paper that he's been puzzlin' over durin'
the whole of this blessed voyage; and what do you suppose it is?' says
he.

"Well, in course we said we didn't know; and some of us said we didn't
care either, seein' that it wasn't any business of ours.

"`Oh, ain't it?' says he. `P'r'aps you won't say it ain't no business
of yours when you know what it is,' he says.

"`Well,' says one of the men--it were Bill Longman--`if you thinks as it
concerns us, why don't you up and tell us what it is, instead of hangin'
in the wind like a ship in irons?' says he.

"So then the steward he tells us as how, that mornin' whilst you was all
at breakfast in the saloon, he'd heard you tellin' about a dream you'd
had the night before; and how you started up in the middle of the meal
and rushed off to your state-room, and stayed there a goodish while, and
then went up on deck and told Sir Edgar as you'd discovered the meanin'
of the paper, which was all about how to find a treasure that was buried
on a desert island somewhere; and that you intended to go on to Sydney
and discharge your cargo, and then take in ballast and sail for the
Pacific to find this here island and get the treasure.

"Of course when he'd finished tellin' us about it there was a great
palaver about buried treasure, and pretty nigh every man in the
fo'c's'le pretended to have heard of a similar case; and we all agreed
as you was a lucky man, and we hoped as how you'd find the island, and
the treasure too. And by-and-by, after there had been a good deal of
talk of that sort, Bill Longman up and says, `But, George,' he says to
the steward, `you haven't told us yet how this here affair concarns us?'

"`Oh, well,' says George, with a curious kind of a laugh, `if you don't
_see_ as how it concarns us, why of course there ain't no more to be
said.' And that was all we could get out of the steward that night.

"But a night or two afterwards, Master George brings up the subject
again by sayin' that he don't suppose it's likely as you'll offer to
share this here treasure with all hands,