her like a lover.

For me, I am Irish, as I have said. I cried "Aye!" and shook hands on
the bargain. We would show Captain Boris Bothwell a thing or two. It
would be odds but we would beat him to those chests hidden in the sand.

This was all very well, but one cannot charter and outfit a ship for a
long cruise upon day-dreams. The moneyed men that I approached smiled
and shook their wise gray heads. To them the whole story was no more
than a castle in Spain. For two days I tramped the streets of San
Francisco and haunted the offices of capitalists without profit to our
enterprise.

On the afternoon of the third I retired, temporarily defeated, to my
club, the Golden Gate. On my salary I had no business belonging to so
expensive a club, but I had inherited from my college days a taste for
good society and I gratified it at the expense of other desires.

In the billiard-room I ran across an acquaintance I had met for the
first time on the Valdez trail some years earlier. His name was Samuel
Blythe. By birth he was English, by choice cosmopolitan. Possessed of
more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a great deal of time
exploring unknown corners of the earth. He was as well known at
Hong-Kong and Simla as in Paris and Vienna. Within the week he had
returned to San Francisco, from an attempt to reach the summit of Mount
McKinley.

He was knocking balls about aimlessly.

"Shoot you a game of pool, Sedgwick," he proposed.

Then I had an inspiration.

"I can give you more fun for your money another way. Come into the
library, Blythe."

There I told him the whole story. He heard me out without a smile. For
that alone I could have thanked him. When I had finished he looked for a
minute out of the window with a far-away expression in his eyes.

"It's a queer yarn," he said at last.

"And of course you don't believe a word of it?" I challenged.

"Don't I? Let me tell you this, old man. There are a number of rum
things in this old world. I've bucked up against two or three of them.
Let me see your map."

I had made another copy of it, with the latitude and longitude omitted.
This I handed to him.

While he examined it his eyes shone.

"By Jove, this _is_ a lark. You can have the old tub if you want it."

He was referring to his splendid steam yacht the _Argos_, in which he
had made the trip to Alaska.

"I haven't the price to outfit her and pay your crew," I explained.

"I have. You'll have to let