“That’s just my point,” said Tempest. “To tell you the truth, I can’t see very far ahead at the moment. If we had a private yacht and plenty of money, the thing would be simplified; but we haven’t too much money between us, and our yacht is now rotting at the bottom of the Pacific. That is as far as the _Mud Turtle_ ever got. Anyway, we’ve got arms and legs, and Jim is going to stick with us.” “By the way, Tempest,” Dave said, “has it ever occurred to you to wonder whether that treasure really would be ours if we did happen to find it?” “It has, and it would,” the other replied. “I know what you mean――the man who mined it turning up and claiming it and all that sort of thing. Yes, I have thought of that, and I should think it’s about a million to one that nothing of the sort could possibly happen after all these years. I talked that over with old Lightning Grummitt, and he took the same view that I do. No, laddie, put that right out of your mind. Never cross your bridges before you get to them. The man who dug that platinum up is as dead as mutton; and though I’m sure I should be only too pleased to let him have his share if he did bob up, it just won’t happen. If he were alive, don’t you think he would have moved heaven and earth to get back to the wreck of the _Hatteras_ and rescue his blessed stuff?” “I suppose he would,” Dave agreed. “But if it comes to that, how do we know that he never did go back to the _Hatteras_ and get it, the same way that we propose to do now?” “How do you know that pigs can’t fly when you aren’t watching ’em?” Tempest expostulated. “How do you know the earth isn’t flat? How do you know the moon isn’t made of green cheese? You’ve never been up to see. The only thing we shall know definitely, if ever we do handle the treasure, is that that platinum miner was too dead to go for it himself.” “There’s no getting away from that,” Dave agreed, now satisfied on the subject. During his watch below, Dave spent some time during the run to the Samoan Islands writing to his father, knowing that Captain Hallard must be growing anxious. He told how they had been cast away, and wrote cheerfully about all the adventures he had had since leaving Australia. Of the immediate future, however, he said very little, not being sure himself of what was likely to happen. “I am leaving this ship,” he added, “at Washington Island, with my friend Bruce Tempest, and we may stop a week or two in that neighborhood.” Dave nibbled the end of his pen thoughtfully for a while. He was wondering whether his father would look Washington Island up on the map and connect his making a stop there with the old _Hatteras_. “After that,” he went on, “I am surely coming home, as I want to see you both again very much. I started out for just one trip away and back, but it seems to have got mixed up somehow, doesn’t it? Ask Aunt Martha to be ready to make me some flapjacks, as I haven’t had any since I left Brooklyn.”