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“You can keep your word for me! What, you think, Gobal, there is no honour in Black Tarboe, and you’ve known me ten years! Haven’t I always kept my word like a clock?”

Gobal stretched out his hand. “Like the sun-sure. That’s enough. We’ll stand by my oath. You shall see the chart.”

Going again inside the cabin, Gobal took out a map grimed with ceaseless fingering, and showed it to Tarboe, putting his finger on the spot where the treasure lay.

“The Bay of Belle Amour!” cried Tarboe, his eyes flashing. “Ah, I know it! That’s where Gaspard the pilot lived. It’s only forty leagues or so from here.” His fingers ran here and there on the map. “Yes, yes,” he continued, “it’s so, but he hasn’t placed the reef right. Ah, here is how Brigond’s ship went down! There’s a needle of rock in the bay. It isn’t here.”

Gobal handed the chart over. “I can’t go with you, but I take your word; I can say no more. If you cheat me I’ll kill you; that’s all.”

“Let me give a bond,” said Tarboe quickly. “If I saw much gold perhaps I couldn’t trust myself, but there’s someone to be trusted, who’ll swear for me. If my daughter Joan give her word–“

“Is she with you?”

“Yes, in the Ninety-Nine, now. I’ll send Bissonnette for her. Yes, yes, I’ll send, for gold is worse than bad whisky when it gets into a man’s head. Joan will speak for me.”

Ten minutes later Joan was in Gobal’s cabin, guaranteeing for her father the fulfilment of his bond. An hour afterwards the Free-and-Easy was moving up stream with her splintered mast and ragged sails, and the Ninety-Nine was looking up and over towards the Bay of Belle Amour. She reached it in the late afternoon of the next day. Bissonnette did not know the object of the expedition, but he had caught the spirit of the affair, and his eyes were like spots of steel as he held the sheet or took his turn at the tiller. Joan’s eyes were now on the sky, now on the sail, and now on the land, weighing as wisely as her father the advantage of the wind, yet dwelling on that cave where skeletons kept ward over the spoils of a pirate ship.

They arrived, and Tarboe took the Ninety-Nine warily in on a little wind off the land. He came near sharing the fate of Brigond, for the yawl grazed the needle of the rock that, hiding away in the water, with a nose out for destruction, awaits its victims. They reached safe anchorage, but by the time they landed it was night, with, however, a good moon showing.

All night they searched, three silent, eager figures, drawing step by step nearer the place where the ancient enemy of man was barracked about by men’s bodies. It was Joan who, at last, as dawn drew up, discovered the hollow between two great rocks where the treasure lay. A few minutes’ fierce digging, and the kegs of gold were disclosed, showing through the ribs of two skeletons. Joan shrank back, but the two men tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing between them on the open shore. Bissonnette’s eyes were hungry–he knew now the wherefore of the quest. He laughed outright, a silly, loud, hysterical laugh. Tarboe’s eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette. On him they stayed a moment. Bissonnette shrank back. Tarboe was feeling for the first time in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten wealth. This passed as his eyes and Joan’s met, for she had caught the melodrama, the overstrain; Bissonnette’s laugh had pointed the situation; and her sense of humour had prevailed. “La, la,” she said, with a whimsical quirk of the head, and no apparent relevancy:

“Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, and your children all gone.”