Well, I rode on for an hour or more until the path led me down to the
very edge of the tide, where I had rough going over a cobbled strand. At
a certain place, which I need not describe, the girth slipped and I had
to dismount to tighten it. And now, friend, I've brought you into the
bit at last; and you can draw your own moral, for it was there, standing
almost in the wash, as I was--"

He seemed to hesitate on the phrase.

"You found the doubloon?" I finished for him.

"Winking up at me from the beach like a yellow eye!" he roared, and his
big fist crashed upon the table and dropped a silence between us. I sat
non-plused.

"Nobody could blame you after that," I said, at length, "for thinking
you had a lucky. As you tell it, the whole purpose of your Odyssey was
the finding of that pocket piece."

I should have laughed--had I not chanced to meet his clear blue gaze
fixed upon me with deadly candor.

"Is such your opinion?" he asked.

"You were certainly justified in backing the thing for all you were
worth," I answered lamely.

"I see I may have to punch your head after all." He smiled quietly.
"I've no skill to show you how it struck me; that's the trouble."

He reached into his pocket again and this time brought out and
flattened carefully before him, with his powerful, deliberate hands, a
little red-bound pamphlet. "Then let me show you what I'd been reading
along the way."

* * * * *

I took the pamphlet from him with expectation at low ebb. It was the
guidebook to Madeira, a product of the local printer, I judged, thrown
together to catch the coppers of the tourist trade. I took it, I say,
rather skeptically, and glanced down the page to which he had folded;
but before I had scanned the half a shock went through me. My
incredulity vanished like mist in a wind. For here is what I read:

_As for the dixovery of this lovely Island of Maderia, which is
indeed a glorious pearl in the sea, it was probable in 1370; but
not by the Portuguese, which come much later. The first was
dixovered by sad accident by a lovely, oldest legend, by an
Englishman named Robin a Machin, Roberto Machim, or Robert Matcham.
He was brave lover of a too beautiful woman to describe, named Anna
d'Arfet, his dear love, which he could not marry because the
enterprise was not recommended by the patrons.

Hizory teaches us these two evaded together to establi