A solemn silence fell upon the company. Gilbert Lorimer raised his glass and gave them "To our next." The aged Captain Crabb surrendered at once to a master. I, alone, followed the young sailor from the room and asked him, at the river's bank, to let me have a story. "Yonder's my ship," he said, indicating the anchor light of a large steamer. "She would be at the Nore before I had well begun." "Then why not write it----?" He shook his head. "I am handier with the gloves," said he. "Oh, but you can spin a plain yarn, I'll be bound." "Well, as to that----" The great steamer sounded her siren and he leaped into the wherry. His last word was a cheery "So long." But he sent me the story of his treasure three months afterwards, and I give it here with scarce a line deleted or a phrase re-turned. II. Every man on board the _Oceanus_--sometime a mail-boat to the South African ports--knew that we carried treasure to Europe, but what was the amount of it, or for whom we carried it, our captain, Joey Castle, alone could say. We had been chartered at Sydney for the purpose, being one of the fastest steamers in Southern waters, and we took in the bullion, chiefly in golden ingots, at Lorenzo Marques. Some did say that it was the property of a Dutch bank, which preferred the American flag to the German, for the _Oceanus_ was under American colours, and a handier steamer of her tonnage I never sailed in. Grant you that the crew were a rough lot--niggers and Lascars, Poles and Swedes, with half-a-dozen Christian white men to put currants on your cake. Well, the owners were one of the safest houses in New York, and fat Joey Castle you might have trusted with the Bank of England itself. Not two cents did he care whether he had a hold full of diamonds or of doughnuts. "I'm going right through, gentlemen," he said to us at dinner the night we sailed, "and if any tin warship threatens me I'll make Europe laugh. Risk! Why, there's twenty times the risk in a roundabout at a fair! Let 'em stop me if they like--I'll put 'em through the goose-step before they've been two minutes aboard, as sure as my name's Joey Castle!" Well, we didn't think very much about it, but there had been a lot of talk ashore concerning the British Government and how it handled suspicious ships entering or leaving Lorenzo Marques. I myself thought it not unlikely that we should have some trouble. To put it honestly, I didn't take the hook on the end of this Dutch bank line; and I just said to myself that our gold was Government gold, and that if it were found aboard of us all the Stars and Stripes between 'Frisco and Sandy Hook wouldn't be worth a red cent to us. We should have to pay out, and quick about it.