our table of packing-boxes for an event which even I, whose role
was that of skeptic, found exciting. Miss Browne was at last to
produce her map and reveal the secret of the island. So far,
except in general terms, she had imparted it to no one. Everybody,
in coming along, had been buying a pig in a poke--though to be sure
Aunt Jane had paid for it. The Scotchman, Cuthbert Vane had told
me incidentally, had insured himself against loss by demanding a
retaining fee beforehand. Somehow my opinion, both of his honesty
and of his intelligence, had risen since I knew this. As to
Cuthbert Vane, he had come purely in a spirit of adventure, and had
paid his own expenses from the start.

However, now the great moment was at hand. But before it comes, I
will here set down the treasure-story of Leeward Island, as I
gathered it later, a little here and there, and pieced it together
into a coherent whole through many dreaming hours.

In 1820, the city of Lima, in Peru, being threatened by the
revolutionaries under Bolivar and San Martin, cautious folk began
to take thought for their possessions. To send them out upon the
high seas under a foreign flag seemed to offer the best hope of
safety, and soon there was more gold afloat on the Pacific than at
any time since the sailing of the great plate-galleons of the
seventeenth century. Captain Sampson, of the brig _Bonny Lass_,
found himself with a passenger for nowhere in particular in the
shape of a certain Spanish merchant of great wealth, reputed
custodian of the private funds of the bishop of Lima. This
gentleman brought with him, besides some scanty personal
baggage--for he took ship in haste--a great iron-bound chest. Four
stout sailors of the _Bonny Lass_ staggered under the weight of it.

The _Bonny Lass_ cruised north along the coast, the passenger
desiring to put in at Panama in the hope that word might reach him
there of quieter times at home. But somewhere off Ecuador
on a dark and starless night the merchant of Lima vanished
overboard--"and what could you expect," asked Captain Sampson in
effect, "when a lubber like him would stay on deck in a gale?"
Strange to say, the merchant's body-servant met the fate of the
heedless also.

Shrugging his shoulders at the carelessness of passengers, Captain
Sampson bore away to Leeward Island, perhaps from curiosity to see
this old refuge of the buccaneers, where the spoils of the sack of
Guayaquil were said to have