for even by this grisly story.  To the rest, these poor bones might indeed bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy.  To me, they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about.  Struck down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall—­just then.  Not the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped for the last of his brown bags—­and then I rejected this, and knew that there was nothing stupid or blind about it—­and wondered whether it were instead malicious, and whether all might have been well with Peter if he had obeyed the voice that bade him leave the crucifix for Bill—­

Vaguely I heard around me a babble of exclamations and conjectures.  Murmurs of interest rose even from our captive band.  Then came Slinker’s voice, loud with sudden fear: 

“Say, you don’t suppose the—­the Bones would of got away with the rest of the coin somehow, do you?” he demanded.

“Got away with it?” Tony contemptuously thrust aside the possibility.  “Got away with it how?  He sure didn’t leave the island with it, did he?  Would he of dug it up from one place jest to bury it in another?  Huh!  Must of wanted to work if he did!  Now my notion is that this happened to one of the guys that was burying the gold, and that the rest jest left him there for a sort of scarecrow to keep other people out of the cave.”

“But the gold?” protested Slinker.  “They wouldn’t leave that for a scarecrow, would they?”

“Maybe not,” admitted Tony, “but suppose that feller died awful slow, and went on hollering and clutching at the bags?  And they couldn’t of got that rock off’n him without a block and tackle, or done much to make things easy for him if they had, him being jest a smear, as you may say.  Well, that cave wouldn’t be a pleasant place to stay in, would it?  And no one would have the nerve to snatch them bags away to bury ’em, ’cause a dying man, especially when he dies hard, can have an awful grip.  So what they done was just to shovel the sand in on the gold they’d stowed away and light out quick.  And what we got to do to-morrow is to go there and dig it up.”

If the ingenuity of this reasoning was more remarkable than its logic, the pirates were not the men to find fault with it.  Indeed, how many human hopes have been bolstered up with arguments no sounder?  Desire is the most eloquent of advocates, and the five ruffians had only to listen to its voice to enjoy in anticipation all the fruits of their iniquitous schemes.  The sight of the golden coins intoxicated them.  They played with the doubloons like children,