that's all I know."

"But why should they be so eager after one doubloon?"

"I don't believe they are so eager after one doubloon," he answered with
slow emphasis.

"And what do you propose to do about it?"

"Well, it's some time since I got any good of proposing anything much."
I saw the lean muscles tighten along the jaw. "But I'm not dead yet." He
glanced at his watch. "It's now eleven o'clock. I can get a horse up to
midnight at the hotel. Before dawn I propose to take my morning plunge
off the rocks, not far from the village of Machico."

"Alone?" I demanded.

He looked at me oddly.

"Suppose you answer that yourself."

I sprang to meet his grip across the table, and thereby almost lost the
use of my fingers.

"Come," he said as he rose, with his compelling smile on me; "you're
about the best coincidence I've met yet."

It was still raining when we climbed into a curtained bullock sled, one
of those public conveyances that snatch the visitor over the pebbled
streets of Funchal at a slithering speed of two miles an hour. The
_carro_ is hardly a joyous vehicle at the best of times. We sat in close
darkness, oppressed by an atmosphere of wet straw and leather, listening
to the mimic thunder on the roof, the gibbering of the yoke pin and the
wail of the driver, a goading fiend in outer space. Possibly these
melancholy matters heightened the dour mood of my new friend, who stayed
silent. To me they were nothing, for I hugged myself in a selfish
content.

Gold! It was all gold--real gold of romance; sunken treasure; mystery;
legend; and a most amazing and veridical trick of Fate that had cast
back five centuries--no less!

I sought to conjure up that other Robert Matcham from the lost past;
that "lover of a too beautiful woman," who ran across the sea with his
heart's desire in the old wild way. A bold and gallant figure, I was
pleased to fancy; an adventuring squire or swaggering free companion in
those red, rude times; a traveler by the sword; perhaps a follower of
the Black Prince to the Spanish Wars, wherein he might have made such
stout allies as the "pilot captain" who served him for his flight.

I pictured him on the deck of his tempest-tossed galley against a
strange and savage coast, standing among the hard-lipped sailors, with
the woman at his side, facing death as one of that breed would know how
to face it; but defiant, clinging to life and to love with grim
tenacity, with a tremendous will