“Ingots, lad—­golden ingots!  Bars and wedges of solid gold!  Gems, too, and cath-e-deral plate, with crucifixions and priests’ vestments stiff with pearls and rubies as if they was frozen.  I’ve seen ’em lyin’ tossed in a heap like mullet in a ground-net.  Ay, and blazin’ on the beach, with the gulls screamin’ over ’em and flappin’, and the sea all around.  I seen it with these eyes, boy” He stood back and shivered.  “And behind o’ that, the Death!  But it comes equal to all, the Death.  Not if a man had learned every trick the devil can teach could he lay his course clear o’ that.  Could he, now?”

His words, his uncouth gestures, which were almost spasms, and the changes in his face—­from cupidity to terror, and from terror again to a kind of wistful hope—­fairly frightened me, and I stammered stupidly that death was the common lot, and there couldn’t be a doubt of it; that or something of the sort.  But what I said does not matter.  He was not listening, and before I had done he drained and set down the glass and gripped my arm again.

“I seen all that—­ay, an’ felt it!” He drew away and stretched out both hands, crooking his fingers like talons.  “Ay, an’ I seen him!”

“Him?” I echoed.  “But you were talking of Death, sir.”

“You may call him that.  There’s men lyin’ around in the sand—­ Did ever you hear, boy, of a poison that kills a man and keeps him fresh as paint?”

“No, sir.”

He nodded.  “No, I reckon you never did.  Fresh as paint it keeps ’em, and white as a figure-head.  The first heap as ever I dug, believin’ it to be the treasure—­my reckoning was out by a foot or two—­I came on one o’ them.  Three foot beneath the sand I came on him, an’ the gulls sheevoing all the while over my head. They knew.  And the sea and the dreadful loneliness around us all the while.  There was three of us, Brooks—­I mention no names, you understand—­three of us, and him.  Three to one.  Yet he got the better of us all—­as he got the better of the first lot, and they must ha’ been a dozen.  Four of them we uncovered afore we struck the edge of the treasure—­uncovered ’em and covered ’em up again pretty quick, I can tell you.  Fresh as paint they were, in a manner o’ speaking, just as though they’d died yesterday; whereas by Bill’s account they must ha’ lain there for more’n a year.  And the faces on ’em white and shinin’—­”

Here Captain Coffin shivered, and, glancing about him, poured out another go of rum.

“You wouldn’t blame me for wantin’ it, Brooks—­not if you’d seen ’em.  That was on the Keys, as they’re called—­half a dozen banks to no’thard of the island, and maybe from half a mile to three-quarters off the shore, which shoals thereabout—­sand, all the lot of ’em, and nothin’ but sand; sand and sea-birds, and—­what I told you.  But the bulk lies in the island itself, in two caches; and where the bigger cache lies he don’t know, and nobody knows but only Dan Coffin.”