The man was gripping his left arm as if in pain, and a thin trickle of
red was running down the back of his big hand.
"Sit down, my jolly old mariner," said Bones anxiously. "What's the
matter with you? What's the trouble, dear old sea-dog?"
The man looked up at him with a grimace.
"They nearly got it, the swine!" he growled.
He rolled up his sleeve and, deftly tying a handkerchief around a red
patch, chuckled: "It is only a scratch," he said. "They've been after me for two days,
Harry Weatherall and Jim Curtis. But right's right all the world over.
I've suffered enough to get what I've got--starved on the high seas,
and starved on Lomo Island. Is it likely that I'm going to let them
share?"
Bones shook his head.
"You sit down, my dear old fellow," he said sympathetically.
The man thrust his hands laboriously into his inside pocket and pulled
out a flat oilskin case. From this he extracted a folded and faded
chart.
"I was coming up to see a gentleman in these buildings," he said, "a
gentleman named Tibbetts."
Bones opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself.
"Me and Jim Curtis and young Harry, we were together in the Serpent
Queen--my name's Dibbs. That's where we got hold of the yarn about
Lomo Island, though we didn't believe there was anything in it. But
when this Dago died----"
"Which Dago?" asked Bones.
"The Dago that knew all about it," said Mr. Dibbs impatiently, "and we
come to split up his kit in his mess-bag, I found this." He shook the
oilskin case in Bones's face. "Well, the first thing I did, when I got
to Sydney, was to desert, and I got a chap from Wellington to put up
the money to hire a boat to take me to Lomo. We were wrecked on Lomo."
"So you got there?" said Bones sympathetically.
"Six weeks I was on Lomo. Ate nothing but crabs, drank nothing but
rain-water. But the stuff was there all right, only"--he was very
emphatic, was this simple old sea-dog--"it wasn't under the third tree,
but the fourth tree. I got down to the first of the boxes, and it was
as much as I could do to lift it out. I couldn't trust any of the
Kanaka boys who were with me."
"Naturally," said Bones. "An' I'll bet they didn't trust you, the
naughty old Kanakas."
"Look here," said Mr. Dibbs, and he pulled out of his pocket a handful
of gold coins which bore busts of a foreign-looking lady and gentleman.
"Spanish gold, that is," he said. "There was four thousand in the
little box. I filled both my pockets, and took 'em back to Sydney when
we were picked up. I didn't dare try in Australia. 'That gold will
keep,' I says to myself. 'I'll get back to England and find a man who
will put up the money for an expedition'--a gentleman, you understand?"