Doubloons

Front matter

By Ralph D. Paine

Since the days of Sir Henry Morgan, the most celebrated of the buccaneers, who died in 1688, the legend of treasure buried by pirates and a chart to mark the spot has been a deep-rooted belief in the romantic faith of deep-sea sailormen. The legend reached high tide about eighty years ago when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous tale “The Gold Bug.” Slowly the belief in buried pirate treasure has receded, yet even to-day there are thousands who constantly seek for such treasure, and there are few of the older deep-sea men who have not seen, at some time, a “chart” directing the searcher where to find buried treasure, usually upon some lonely island, or some deserted mainland beach. Mr. Paine, in this story, has told the tale of a pirate chart in his clear, convincing style. It reads, to the editors, like a true story with extraordinary happenings.

A COMPLETE NOVEL (By Request)

Chapter I

CHAPTER I.

CAPTAIN JOSEPH KEMPTON had commanded one of the last of the stately square-rigged ships that flew the Stars and Stripes on blue water. It was the ignoble fate of this Endymion of his to be dismantled and cut down for a coal barge while still in her prime. No more would she lift topsail yards to the breath of the Pacific trades or nobly storm across the Western Ocean. In the battle for trade, she was unable to survive the rivalry of sooty tramp freighters that roamed for cargo everywhere.

In such ships as this had her master learned his trade and served his years. He was left without a calling, a man hale and efficient, but too old to begin again in steam. His savings amounted to a few thousand dollars, not enough to live on, besides which idleness was hateful to contemplate. At length he found a berth as watchman or caretaker in a nautical graveyard on the New England coast, where vessels no longer worth repairing found their last resting place, to rot, or to be burned for the metal in their hulls, or broken up for junk.

It was a rather melancholy haven for one who loved the sea and ships and had briskly lorded it on his own quarter-deck. There were times when Captain Kempton winced and sighed at the sight of the nodding, rusty funnels and shabby deck houses beside the weedy wharves, and the gaunt fabrics of abandoned schooners resting on the mud flats. He was a brooding, disappointed man, but the bright presence of his daughter saved his thoughts from bitterness.

At nineteen, Eudora Kempton viewed life as anything else than a finished chapter, and this nautical graveyard was less sad than romantic, a place for dreaming dreams adventurous or pensive. Gifted with a serene optimism, she found contentment in her duty, which was to make the white cottage by the harbor as pleasant a home as possible for her father. These two comprised the household. There were estimable young men in the port of Falmouth who would have been glad to make other arrangements for Eudora, for they thought her exceeding fair; but she declared that her heart was fancy-free.

This was a feminine evasion, pardonable enough because it would never do to let a certain Dan Sloan think anything else. He was Eudora’s problem, to be handled with care. She dared not reveal too much, by a smile or a glance, for a masterful wooer was this mate of the big seagoing tug Endeavor which fetched the coal-laden barges coastwise from Norfolk. Stalwart, alert, and a native gentleman, he had a fine reputation afloat, but, alas! a some what tempestuous one ashore. Plaintively he recited his troubles to Eudora, but she was not easily persuaded. Other young men of twenty-three were old enough to behave themselves and avoid rows and ructions. It was always Dan Sloan who had whipped three sailors or blackened the eye of a policeman. In short, the impetuous mate was severely on probation, and his footing with Eudora was that of a rather precarious friendship, nothing more.

It was on a day in early summer when a visitor sought this picturesque corner of the harbor and wandered among the untenanted vessels. Curiously he scanned them, halting now and then to scribble in a notebook. His appearance suggested neither a seafaring man nor a dealer in marine junk, and his behavior interested Captain Kempton, who was enjoying a pipe on the porch of the cottage. He was about to saunter to the wharf and accost this harmless trespasser when Eudora, who was plying a hoe in her flower garden, paused to remark:

“You might think he owned the place. Such a grand manner! Please find out who he is and what he wants.”

“A summer boarder from along shore somewhere, most likely,” said her parent. “But I can’t make out why he is so infernally busy with a pencil. An artist, maybe; but they are rigged different.”

Eudora turned to her flowers, which were much more important that a mere man, and the captain moved in the direction of the water front. A closer view disclosed to him that the stranger was thirty or thereabouts, rather heavy-featured, and of a portly figure. His complexion was florid, his taste in dress slightly so. As the shipmaster approached him, he clambered down from the hulk of a river steamer and heartily exclaimed, with hand outstretched:

“Captain Kempton? They told me about you in Falmouth this morning. I want to ask you a lot of questions. Bully stuff, this!”

“An unsightly mess, it seems to me. I get tired of looking at it,” was the friendly reply. “What can I do for you?”

“Tell me the stories of some of these relics, and something about your own career,” smiled the other. “Mannice is my name—William Marmaduke Mannice. You may have seen some of my signed features in the Sunday sheets. I got wind of this salt-water bone yard of yours, and ran up from Boston to look it over for a special story. Color and human interest! I doped it out right. It’s all here.”

Now this happened to be a true statement, but Mr. Mannice had often found it inconvenient to tell the whole truth. Several metropolitan editors could vouch for his talent as a reporter, but they preferred not to discuss him otherwise. Their language was apt to be come heated. In their milder moments, they called him lazy and unreliable and foresaw his finish. So accurate was this prediction that the gifted William Marmaduke Mannice, again dismissed for cause, had been forced into the ranks of the unemployed. His exit from New York had been hastened by the failure of an attempt to raise funds which skirted too near the edge of blackmail, and he uneasily surmised that he had not heard the last of it.

With a very few dollars, he was marooned in Boston, a free lance who had to peddle his stuff from one office to another until he could find a chance to employ his wits to better advantage. The trip to Falmouth was in the nature of a foraging expedition. With photographs, and done in his breezy style, here was a story that ought to sell.

His type of man was unfamiliar to Captain Joseph Kempton, who had the sailor’s fine simplicity of character. Shrewd in his own domain, he had dealt mostly with those who hit straight from the shoulder, whose vices and virtues were plain to read. This affable journalist made a pleasant diversion in the monotony of his existence, and it was flattering to have him display an interest in the career of one of the last of the true-blue Yankee shipmasters.

Vivid were the episodes he was moved to recall, with the tang of briny seas and strong winds, as they lingered upon the wharf, and Mr. Mannice was a sympathetic listener. At length they boarded a forlorn wooden hull whose shapely prow still bore the white figure head of some chaste goddess and whose name, Wanderer, was discernible in a gilded scroll.

“A sister ship to my Endymion," said Captain Kempton. “They were launched from the same yard in Bath, and my uncle sailed this one in the China trade. I raced him from Shanghai to Liverpool once, and we finished six hours apart, for a bet of a thousand dollars. It was a record passage. We both carried away all our spare spars and lost men overboard, several of them.”

Mannice glanced at the well-knit, keen-eyed mariner, so mild of mien and quiet of speech, and found it difficult to realize that he belonged to a vanished era of splendid endeavor. What he had seen and done thrilled one’s fancy, and the reporter was genuinely sincere as he said:

“People have forgotten, and they don’t care whether or not American shipping be crowded off the high seas. To find a man like you, with this back ground and all that—well, there is more of a punch to it than I could dig out of a barrel of statistics.”

“Why not come up to the house and sit down?” said the captain, greatly pleased. “I’ll be glad to have you stay for dinner, Mr. Mannice. It’s quite a walk to a hotel in Falmouth, and we can talk at our leisure.”

Possibly because he had caught a distant glimpse of Eudora, the visitor accepted with instant alacrity. Misfortune had not dulled a belief in his prowess with the ladies. The captain’s daughter was singing in the kitchen, for she was an old-fashioned girl who enjoyed the fine art of cookery, nor did she whisk off the white apron as she went to meet the guest. Courteous was her welcome as a hostess, but Mr. Mannice noted that her gaze was fearlessly direct and that she was trying to appraise him for herself. Always at ease, he made himself agreeable, taking no pains to hide his admiration. Eudora’s lovely color was all her own, and the years of her girlhood at sea in the Endymion had given her fine figure a carriage singularly graceful and reliant.

While the trio sat at dinner, the guest was reminded of a fantastic sea tale which had been going the rounds of the newspapers. It concerned a buried treasure, a lonely Pacific islet, and an expedition fitting out at San Francisco.

“I presume you ran across these legends during your voyages. Captain Kempton,” said Mannice. “Odd that people should take stock in them, don’t you think?”

“I see nothing odd in it.” And the reply was unexpectedly emphatic. The mariner straightened himself in his chair, his strong face glowed with feeling, and he was like a younger man as he continued: “The pirates and the buccaneers hid their hoards, no doubt. Their booty was immense, more than they could have squandered. The Captain Kidd tradition is a myth, exploded long ago; but in many other instances2”

“You have started my father off on a hobby of his, Mr. Mannice,” laughingly interrupted Eudora. “He has been collecting material for years. Perhaps he will show you some of his rare books and prints.”

“A fascinating subject,” replied the reporter, scenting another marketable story. "Do you mind telling me, sir, where some of this plunder is buried?”

“Fourteen millions of it is on Cocos Island, saved from the sack of Lima,” promptly answered the shipmaster. “I once sighted volcanic little Trinidad off the coast of Brazil, where more of the Spanish loot was left, but the sea was too heavy for me to send a boat ashore. Why, in twenty ports, from Manila to Rio, I have heard yarns like these, too circumstantial to be waved aside. They can’t be pure invention, or sane men would not be spending fortunes every year to send out vessels to search for treasure.”

“We are ever so much more sensible,” came from Eudora. “Father and I dream our treasure finding right here at home and then plan how we shall spend it.”

Captain Kempton silenced her with a gesture of annoyance, as though this were a theme too serious for jesting. She regarded him a little anxiously, and would have talked of something else, but Mannice persisted:

“But did those gay old cutthroats really leave any charts with the crosses and compass bearings all marked down? And if they didn’t, how the deuce does anybody know where to look?”

“There are such charts,” seriously affirmed the skipper. “They have been handed down from survivors who were not drowned or hanged. I have heard of one or two perfectly well authenticated. A party that chartered a schooner out of Havana three years ago had one of them. I knew the man they hired as master. He wrote me about it.”

“And did they find the stuff?” queried the incredulous Mannice.

“If they did, they would keep mum. It might be claimed by some government or other as treasure-trove. But if they didn’t, the chart might not have been to blame. Landmarks change or vanish in two or three centuries, and the sea may shift a coast line beyond recognition.”

“And it’s a good gamble that somebody will turn up the jewels and the pieces of eight if they dig long enough?” cried the reporter, who was becoming excited.

“Provided they are equipped with a proper chart,” and Captain Kempton smote the table with his fist. “Why, if I were lucky enough to stumble on a document of this kind, I wouldn’t hesitate a minute to spend some money on it—go take a look, I mean.”

“And put us in the poorhouse?” chided Eudora, who had returned from the kitchen to stand at his elbow like a guardian angel. “There would be a mutiny in his family.”

“I’m not joking,” asserted her father, addressing himself to Mannice. “I know what I am talking about. I have enough laid by to fit out a vessel, and a man might as well stake it all on one throw as to molder his life away with the other hulks in this graveyard.”

Mannice stared, and was silent. He had stirred unsuspected currents of emotion. It was easy to read that the captain was in rebellion against his tragic destiny and hoped to find some way of escape. His mind unoccupied, his normal activity thwarted, he dreamed of treasure and adventure for lack of anything more tangible. This made the story so much the better, reflected William Marmaduke Mannice, whose attitude toward his fellow man was essentially selfish. While Eudora washed the dishes, he sat on the porch and smoked with Captain Kempton, who needed no persuasion to pursue the same subject At his fingers’ ends was an amazing amount of lore and legend, of facts that denoted a profound historical research, of conclusions worked out with the utmost ingenuity.

Reluctantly, at length, the journalist asked the time of day, for a pawn ticket reposed where his own watch should have been. Another half hour and he must think of taking a train to Boston. Eudora was among her flowers, and he desired to know her better before departing. His heart may have been calloused, but there was no denying the fact that it beat a trifle faster whenever he looked at the captain’s winsome daughter. He became aware that he was still capable of an infatuation.

Eudora greeted him with a certain dignified aloofness, and appeared more interested in the weeds in the pansy bed. This he laid to feminine coyness. It was a way the pretty creatures had, but trust a man of the world to play the game with patience and finesse. Blandly, he exclaimed, hat in hand:

“May I beg a few forget-me-nots for remembrance, Miss Kempton? This has been one of those days—well, a sort of inspiration.”

“Yes, my father can be very entertaining,” she crisply replied, disregarding his plea. “Tell me, do you intend to put him in a newspaper?”

“Er—he appeals to me as a striking personality. Yes, I should like to describe him.”

“Oh, I don’t mind what you may say about his life and service. I’m sure it will please him, Mr. Mannice. But about his lost-treasure hobby—I forbid that, you know. He take it too seriously now, and he mustn’t be encouraged.”

The journalist hesitated, and plausibly lied: “Your word is law. I could promise you anything if you would let me come to see you again.”

“Again? You didn’t come to see me to-day,” quoth the unsatisfactory Eudora. “By the way, you are not allowing yourself any too much time to catch that train. You are rather stout for rapid walking.”

This was an insult deliberate and cutting. Mr. Mannice turned quite red, bit his lip, and for once was taken aback. With a low bow and a murmured farewell, he clapped his hat on his head and passed grandly from the garden. Eudora smiled, and overtook her parent, who was pacing the path to the wharf.

“An uncommonly pleasant visitor,” said he. “He woke me up a bit. Able in his own line, I should say. How did you like him?”

“Not as much as he likes himself,” was her analysis. “He impressed me as the least bit gone to seed. His clothes were not really shabby, and I couldn’t call his face dissipated, but—perhaps I’ll have to call if intuition. A cable length would be far enough to trust Mr. William Marmaduke Mannice, I think.”

This seemed to ruffle Captain Kempton, usually so affectionate, and he hastily retorted:

“That sounds critical and unkind, Eudora. I don’t agree with you at all. Really, I have so few pleasures, and2”

“And it is horrid of me,” she penitently broke in. “It was lots of fun. Did you give him your photograph?”

“Yes. My old friends will be glad to see it published. I shall want some extra copies of the paper. I urged Mr. Mannice to drop in again.”

“He will,” was the verdict of Eudora, who had her own private opinion. William Marmaduke was an admirer not easily suppressed.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II.

It was in a Boston lodging house by no means luxurious that the accomplished journalist sat down at once to arrange his notes and write three columns of swinging prose in praise of Yankee ships and sailors that sail the seas no more. The image of Eudora was somewhat distracting but there was no time to waste, for he needed the money. With the untiring facility of long training, he drove at his task until far in the night, and was nearing the end when a brilliant idea occurred to him. He had a fatal weakness for improving on the facts. Putting it more bluntly, he felt no scruples over faking a story when he thought he could get away with it.

In this instance, he hesitated, reluctant to offend Miss Eudora, but he might be adroit enough to explain it away were he to meet her again, and sentiment must yield to necessity. For an extra fifty dollars in his pocket, he was prepared to take chances. He dared not tarry much longer in Boston. It was not far enough away from New York.

Here was this Captain Kempton, he said to himself, with the buried-treasure bee in his bonnet. Why not counterfeit a pirate’s chart, in exact imitation of the real thing, clever enough at least to fool a Sunday editor? There was the old clipper ship Wanderer rotting at the wharf. While poking about in her forecastle, so Mannice swiftly evolved the story, he had dislodged a board that was about to fall from its rusty nails above one of the bunks. Behind the board was a small space in which he discovered what looked to be an ancient, sea-stained document. It proved to be a chart, roughly drawn in ink upon a square of parchment. Some seamen had hidden it there for safe-keeping perhaps half a century ago.

So far so good. Mr. Mannice began to feel the satisfaction of an artist. The really dramatic touch, the situation, was to be in the alleged fact that he, a random visitor, should have stumbled upon this strange old chart while the custodian of the Wanderer, Captain Joseph Kempton, was dreaming his days away in the hope of discovering this very thing.

“A Sunday editor ought to fall for it,” thoughtfully reflected the scapegrace, “provided he isn’t wise to my past.”

From his trunk, he brought out several large envelopes filled with newspaper clippings, and dumped them upon the table. They had been saved from time to time as possible suggestions for special articles, grist for the mill, an assortment of odd or striking news paragraphs and the like. Recalling one in particular, he made a hasty search, and was delighted at finding it. Briefly, it referred to a certain industrious pirate, Peleg Peterson by name, who harried the New England coast in the eighteenth century and had buried his treasure on one of the Seven Islands in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, west of Anticosti, and northwest of Cape Gaspe.

“Peleg Peterson is the boy,” cheerfully observed Mr. Mannice. “And now I know where to plant his stuff. Watch me fake a chart to-morrow that will fool Captain Kempton himself when he sees it reproduced.”

The first errand was to procure a piece of genuine parchment in a little shop on Cornhill. Then, with the skill of a born forger, he inked in the crude outline of a very small island, avoiding too much detail. A tree and a big rock and a small bay served as marks, so many paces this way and so many that, according to the compass, all noted in one corner of the chart as set down by the sprawling fist of the illiterate Peleg Peterson.

Then, with candle grease and coffee stains, cobwebs and dust, did William Marmaduke Mannice proceed to age and disguise his handiwork, even to spilling rum on it, as suggested by his boyhood acquaintance with Billy Bones and other literary worthies of this ilk. The result was gratifying. It would not have deceived an expert in old manuscripts, but for the purpose intended it was amazingly clever, and Mr. Mannice virtuously commented that he had the Wanderer and Captain Kempton around which to build the narrative. They actually existed, beyond a doubt.

Plausible, self-assured, with never a pang of conscience, William Marmaduke Mannice swaggered downtown to vend his wares. While crossing Washington Street, he suddenly halted, as if detained by an unseen hand, and was almost run over by an automobile. Retreating to the pavement, he vanished into a café and ordered a cocktail while he wrestled with the inspiration that had come like a bolt from the blue. It was big—something worth while.

“Boob!” he bitterly addressed himself. “A little more and you would have sold this perfectly good chart for a song. And there is a fine old sea dog at Falmouth who yearns to get his hands on it.”

It was the spirit of Broadway that spoke, the spirit that tolerates the man who lives by his wits and regards the easy mark as fair prey. The scheme of hoaxing Captain Kempton with this bogus chart appealed to Mannice for several reasons. He hoped to share the dollars which the father of Eudora had said were ready to be staked on a treasure expedition, and he was exceedingly anxious to disappear somewhere until matters in New York looked less hostile. It was anything to tide over the crisis, to save him from being broke and stranded. Besides, he foolishly sighed to be near Eudora, and if he could not dip into the father’s little fortune by means of the treasure-hunting scheme, he might possibly feather his nest in marrying the daughter.

The plot had this charming feature—it might be full of ethical flaws, but there could be no way of enmeshing Mr. Mannice as obtaining money under false pretenses. This he was careful to elucidate to himself. It was a speculation in which he could not lose, and he saw a chance to win. As for Captain Joseph Kempton, it was doing him a kindness. He would be happy looking for treasure, whether he found it or not. People who went daffy over this sort of thing ought to be given an opportunity to get it out of their systems.

Mr. Mannice drank another cocktail, and carefully counted his cash reserve. He was near the end of his rope, but there was enough for another trip to Falmouth. He moved promptly, taking a train which landed him in that sea port shortly after nightfall of this same day. Cautiously, he made his way on foot to the corner of the harbor where the forsaken vessels lay in a row, and passed wide of the captain’s cottage. The place was unwatched at night, and, unobserved, he stumbled out upon the dilapidated wharf at which the Wanderer was moored.

A pocket flash light enabled him to find his way into the musty forecastle which he had previously explored with Captain Kempton. It was not difficult to pry aside a decayed bit of the boarding behind a tier of bunks and shove therein the crumpled parchment. Assuring himself that it looked as if it had long lain there undisturbed, he replaced the board and hammered it fast. After looking about, to make certain he had left no traces, the guileful intruder stole out of the Wanderer and sought the darkened highway to Falmouth. There a small hotel sheltered him until morning, when he prepared to call at the cottage of Captain Kempton as though just arrived from Boston.

Shortly after breakfast Eudora bethought herself of an errand, and she took the longer road to a neighbor’s house in order that she might overlook the harbor bar and the flashing sea beyond. Perhaps she would not have confessed it as a reason, but the powerful steel tug Endeavor had been reported as passing the cape, inbound from the southward, and Dan Sloan was the mate. Eudora gazed in vain, shrugged a shapely shoulder as if it made no difference whatever, and continued on her way.

Captain Kempton had gone down to the beach to oversee a gang of men who were scrapping the engines of a small steamer when Mr. William Marmaduke Mannice, having found the cottage empty, discovered him and advanced at a gait more hurried than usual. The visitor wore an air of suppressed excitement, rehearsed beforehand, and to the captain’s cordial greeting he replied:

“You’re not half as surprised as I am, my dear sir. I didn’t expect to give myself the pleasure, but a most extraordinary thing has happened—if you are too busy for a chat. I’ll wait, of course.”

The mariner’s curiosity was piqued, and he withdrew a few yards from his workmen as he said:

“I am glad you found an excuse to run down again, Mr. Mannice. Shall we sit down here on the bulwark?”

Mannice glanced to right and left, and lowered his voice. It was enough to give the interview a flavor of mystery.

“It is a matter between us. You will understand when I explain. I would rather not run any risk of being overheard.”

The captain looked puzzled, but nodded, and moved in the direction of the cottage. Mannice made no disclosures, discussing the weather and politely inquiring about Miss Kempton and her health, until they had come to the porch. The shipmaster was a man who had learned to keep his own counsel, and he awaited the import of this second pilgrimage. An ugly customer to hoodwink and be caught at it, even though his hair was silvered, reflected Mannice, as he scanned the resolute profile and glanced at the sinewy hinds. But there was no hint of misgiving in the young man’s demeanor as he smoothly began:

“Your yarns of buried treasure interested me so much that it was hard for me to think of anything else when I returned to Boston. It occurred to me that among my clippings there might be something worth sending to add to your collection. I had saved very little treasure stuff, and could dig up only one item. I must have put it away several years ago, and it was badly torn. But I pieced it together and made a typewritten copy. It’s queer, awfully queer. Captain Kempton, a hundred-to-one shot, but2”

“Perhaps I have heard it from some other source,” was the quick interruption. “Most of those newspaper reports are sheer moonshine.”

“True enough,” handsomely agreed Mannice. “My only reason for paying any attention to this was what you might call a coincidence. It seems that a very old man died in a Liverpool hospital, leaving a rambling statement to the effect that he had sailed before the mast in the deep-water trade. During one of his last voyages, the deuce of a while ago, I presume, he had been laid up with yellow fever in Valparaiso. The man in the next cot, another English sailor, was almost dead, but before he cashed in he gave this chap a little packet wrapped in canvas and told him to keep it for himself. It had come down from his grandfather and was the real goods, said the owner, straight from one of the crew who had sailed with a pirate known as Peleg Peterson.”

“A chart, of course,” exclaimed Captain Kempton, springing from his chair to stride the porch. “The story has a familiar sound, but you can never tell. Please go on. There was a Peleg Peterson, a lively rascal. He was hanged at Execution Dock, with five of his men.”

The narrator felt increasing confidence, and he resumed more weightily: “This sailor lived to get out of Valparaiso in an American clipper ship. His mind weakened in old age, or sickness impaired it. At any rate, he was unable to remember the name of the ship. He did remember, however, that he had tucked the chart away behind the planking over his bunk in the forecastle, hoping some day to go looking for the treasure. He was badly smashed up in a storm on the homeward voyage and lugged ashore with a broken leg. The ship sailed away without him, and he was never able to run across her again. And so he lost his precious chart.”