Aunts -- Fiction; Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Love stories; Treasure troves -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
The old man died in the house of a niece, to whom by way of legacy
he left his map. For the satisfaction of his anxious mind, still
poring on the treasure, she wrote down what she could grasp of his
instructions, and then, being an unimaginative woman, gave the
matter little further heed. For years the map lay among other
papers in a drawer, and here it was at length discovered by her
son, himself a sailor. He learned from her its history, and having
been in the Pacific, and heard the tales and rumors that cling
about Leeward Island like the everlasting surf of its encompassing
seas, this grand-nephew of old Hopperdown's, by name David Jenkins,
became for the rest of his days a follower of the _ignis fatuus_.
An untaught, suspicious, grasping man, he rejected, or knew not how
to set about, the one course which offered the least hope, which
was to trade his secret for the means of profiting by it. AH his
restless, hungry life he spent in wandering up and down the seas,
ever on the watch for some dimly imagined chance by which he might
come at the treasure. And so at last he wandered into the London
hospital where he died.
And to me the wildest feature of the whole wild tale was that at
the last he should have parted with the cherished secret of a
lifetime to Miss Higglesby-Browne.
In a general way, every one of us knew this history. Even I had
had an outline of it from Cuthbert Vane. But so far nobody had
seen the map. And now we were to see it; the time that intervened
before that great event had already dwindled to minutes, to
seconds--
But no; for Miss Browne arose and began to make a speech. The
beginning of it dealt in a large and generalizing manner with
comradeship and loyalty, and the necessity of the proper mental
attitude in approaching the business we had in hand. I did not
listen closely. The truth is, I wanted to see that map. Under the
spell of the island, I had almost begun to believe in the chest of
doubloons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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