But even our regrets for Peter did not chill the exultation with which we thought of the treasure-chest waiting there under the sand in the cabin of the _Island Queen_. All afternoon we talked of it. That, for the present, was all we could do. There were the two prisoners in camp to be guarded--and they had presently awakened and made remarks of a strongly personal and unpleasant trend on discovering their situation. There was Crusoe invalided, and needing petting, and getting it from everybody on the score of his romantic past as _Benjy_ as well as of his present virtues. The broken leg had been cleverly set by Dugald--somehow in the late upheaval _Miss_ and _Mister_ had dropped quite out of our vocabularies--with Cuthbert as surgeon's assistant and me holding the chloroform to the patient's nose. There was the fatigue and reaction from excitement which everybody felt, and Peter's diary to be read, and golden dreams to be indulged. And there was the delicate question to be discussed, of how the treasure should be divided. "Why, it all belongs to Virginia, of course," said Cuthbert, opening his eyes at the thought of any other view being taken but this obvious one. "Nonsense!" I hastily interposed. "My finding the diary was just an accident; I'll take a share of it--no more." Here Miss Browne murmured something half inaudible about "--confined to members of the Expedition--" but subsided for lack of encouragement. "I suggest," said Dugald, "that our numbers having most fortunately diminished and there being, on the basis of Peter's calculations, enough to enrich us all, that we should share and share alike." And this proposal was received with acclamations, as was a second from the same source, devoting a certain percentage of each share to Cookie, to whom the news of his good fortune was to come later as a great surprise. As an earnest of our riches, we had the two bags of doubloons which the pirates had recovered from the fleshless fingers of the dead man. They were old worn coins, most of them, many dating from the seventeenth century, and bearing the effigies of successive kings of Spain. Each disk of rich, yellow Peruvian gold, dug from the earth by wretched sweating slaves and bearing the name of a narrow rigid tyrant, had a history, doubtless, more wild and bloody than even that we knew. The merchant of Lima and his servant, Bill Halliwell, and afterward poor Peter had died for them. For their sake we had been captives in fear of death, and for their sake now four wretched beings were prisoners in the treasure-cave and two more cursed, fate and their bonds within hearing of our outraged ears. And who knew how much more of crime and blood and violence we should send forth into the world with the long-buried treasure? Who knew--and, ah, me, who cared? So riotous was the gold-lust in my veins that I think if I had known the chest to be another Pandora's box I should still have cried out to open it.