The Radio Boys Under the Sea: or, The Hunt for Sunken Treasure. Duffield J. W.
old life coming to so pitiable an end in the depths of the San Domingo forest.
“Of course, I promised,” Benton went on, “and as a matter of fact I saw to that matter of the candle as soon as I got back to the city. I didn’t attach any importance to the old man’s revelations. I’d have thought the whole thing was simply a sick man’s ravings if it hadn’t been for the papers. They at least were real, something that could be seen and handled. Probably they wouldn’t amount to anything, but they promised at least to be a bit of interesting reading when I got back to the barracks.
“I buried the old man near his cabin and then hiked back to the nearest post. I was kept pretty busy for some time, and the papers remained stowed away in my kit bag.
“After a while, our squad was relieved from the interior work and sent back to the capital for a breathing spell and the mere routine duty called for. One day when I was off duty and time was hanging a little heavy on my hands, I though of the papers and fished them out. They had to be handled with care, as some of them were nearly falling to pieces.
“I soon found however that they didn’t do me much good, for they were written in Spanish. Of course, in knocking about those countries I had picked up a good deal of the lingo, enough to get by with in ordinary conversation. But that didn’t help me so much when it came to reading about unfamiliar things, especially in the Spanish of two hundred years ago.
“And just here is where I made a mistake. There was a half breed that did odd jobs about the post, a fellow named Ramirez. He happened to be passing through the barracks just then on an errand for one of the officers, and I called him and asked him to translate one of the papers for me.
“He agreed, after bargaining that I should give him an American quarter for the job, which I did. He commenced to read. I listened for a while, and then I began to sit up and take notice. Believe me that by this time he was taking notice too. His hands were trembling, his voice was shaky and his eyes – he had about the wickedest pair of eyes I ever saw in a human head – were fairly shining with greediness.
“I snatched the paper back from him. He begged like a cripple to let him go on with it. Offered to give me back my quarter and do it for nothing. But by that time I was wise to the mistake I had made and told him to go along and roll his hoop. His eyes were like those of a rattlesnake when he realized I was in earnest.
“After I had finally got rid of him, I did some tall thinking. I got a dictionary and a grammar and settled down to learn the language. I took some lessons also from the old padre of the church in which I had burned the candle. He was delighted at my sudden interest in what he called his ‘beautiful mother tongue,’ and did all he could to help me along. So in the course of time I was able to get the sense of these papers. Some of the words are blurred and some have been wiped out by time, but what I couldn’t read I could at least make a very fair guess at.
“Before I had received the papers I had fully made up my mind to re-enlist, for as I told you before I was in love with the service. But after I had read them I began to count the days before my present term should expire. I had made up my mind that I was going to take a chance. I might fail, but if I did there was the good old service waiting for me at any time. And if I succeeded, there wouldn’t be need of worrying about anything for the rest of my life.
“And now,” he continued, as he knocked the ash from his cigar and glanced at the faces of his spellbound auditors, “that about brings me up to the present time. Oh yes, there’s one thing more – about that Ramirez.
“That fellow dogged me like my shadow for the rest of the time I was in San Domingo. He kept turning up at the most unexpected places. I got tired of it at last and told him to keep out of my way or he’d be sorry for it. One night when we were camping out, I woke up to find someone rifling my kit in my tent. I jumped up and tackled him, but he got away after knifing me in the arm.”
He rolled up his sleeve and showed a deep scar just above the elbow.
“That’s the memento he left me,” he remarked grimly. “In the darkness I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I recognized Ramirez. The first thing I did after getting a light and binding up my arm was to look for the papers. Luckily they were at the bottom of my kit and the thief hadn’t got to them when I woke up. Another thing that makes me think it was Ramirez is that the rascal disappeared from his usual haunts after that and I’ve never seen anything of him since. But it goes to show,” he added with that whimsical smile of his, “that I’m not the only one who attaches some importance to these papers.
“Now let’s see how they strike you,” he continued, drawing his chair closer to the table, while the Radio Boys crowded eagerly about him.
CHAPTER V
MAROONED
There were many separate papers in the package that Benton spread out before the fascinated eyes of the boys. Only one or two larger sheets seemed like a consecutive narrative. Others were mere scraps of paper that looked as though they had been picked up in lieu of something better for the writer to put his thoughts upon.
Bitter thoughts most of them were, thoughts of vengeance, imprecations upon the authors of alleged wrongs from which the writer had suffered, chants of hate that seemed as though they might have blistered the paper on which they were written. As the boys handled carefully those yellowed sheets of paper, so brittle from time that they were almost falling apart, so yellowed that in many cases the writing was almost illegible, the years rolled away and before them rose up the picture of that solitary figure on an island in the Caribbean eating his heart out with rage and hate and finding his only solace in setting down from day to day his prayers for vengeance on the souls of those who had brought him to that pass.
Benton had arranged them as nearly as might be in chronological order and kept up a running series of comments and explanations as he went along.
“You can see,” he said, “that the writing isn’t merely a scrawl. It was the work of a man with considerable education. I’ve gathered from the story as I went through it that he was the son of a well to do family in one of the colonies that bordered on the Caribbean Sea about two centuries ago. Those were wild and reckless days in that quarter of the world, with the buccaneers roaming up and down the Spanish Main, sinking ships and once in a while attacking the towns on the coast and robbing them of their treasures. This fellow was probably the black sheep of some respectable family who went to the bad and ran away and joined the pirates. Probably he was just as bad as any of the rest of them, though to read his story you’d think that he was a poor persecuted man and that all the wrong was on the side of his shipmates.
“You know that in those days the pirates had a code of laws of their own. They were some of the vilest wretches that ever went unhung and flouted all the laws of the civilized nations of the world. They were Ishmaels, their hands against every man’s and every man’s hands against them. But even they had to have some laws of their own, or the Brotherhood, as they called their choice collection of scoundrels, would have gone to pieces.
“Now one of the laws that they laid most store by was that whenever a ship or a town was looted, none of the pirates should hold out any particular bit of treasure that he might come across. Everything was to be brought and placed in a great pile at the foot of the mast on the pirate ship and then a division was made, so much to the captain, so much to the mates, so much to each member of the crew.
“The punishment for any member of the crew who was caught violating this law was that he should be marooned. That meant that he was to be taken to some one of the many little desolate islands that stud the Caribbean, put ashore with about enough provisions to last him a month and then left to shift for himself.
“In most cases that amounted to a sentence of death. Either the man would starve after his provisions were exhausted, or even if he succeeded for a time in dragging out a miserable existence he would go mad from loneliness and hopelessness. It was one of the punishments most dreaded by the pirates of the Brotherhood.
“Well, marooning was what happened to Santos, the pirate whose writing is on these papers. Likely enough he deserved it, though he says he didn’t. You can see what he says here.”
Benton picked