read in his dark face a malignant
rage, in her fair, flushed one a defiant triumph. Stooping, I gathered
the document that lay under my foot, then ran forward and swung to the
platform of the car.

If there had been time for second thought I might have stayed to see the
drama out, or I might have left the cause of quarrel where it lay. As it
was I had done neither one thing nor the other. Having yielded to
impulse so far as to pick up the paper, I had then done the conventional
thing and ignored the little scene above.

But when I glanced back up the hill I glimpsed a man flying bareheaded
from a doorway and pursuing the car with gestures of impotent fury.

All the way down to the business quarter the odd affair challenged my
interest. What did it mean? The picture in the window was no laughing
romp meant to end in kisses. So much I was willing to swear. There was
passion in both the faces.

Out of those two lives I had snatched a vivid moment, perhaps one of
many common to them, perhaps the first their intersecting life-lines had
developed.

Was the man her husband? I was not willing to think so. More likely a
brother, I persuaded myself. For it was already being borne in upon me
that freakish chance had swept me into the orbit of the thing we spell
Romance.

A petty domestic quarrel suggested itself as the obvious solution, but
the buoyant youth in me refused any such tame explanation. For the girl
was amazingly pretty.

After a glance at it I put the crumpled paper in my pocketbook. In that
crowded car, hanging to a strap, I could make nothing of it. At the
office my time belonged to Kester & Wilcox until noon, for I was still
in that preliminary stage of my legal career during which I found it
convenient to exchange my inexperience for fifteen dollars a week. A
clouded real-estate title was presumably engaging my attention, but
between my mind and the abstract kept jumping a map with the legend
"Doubloon Spit" above it.

Faith, the blood sang in my veins. The scent of adventure was in my
nostrils. A fool you may think me, but I was already on the hunt for
buried treasure. Half a dozen times I had the paper out furtively, and
as soon as my hour of release came I cleared the desk and spread the
yellow, tattered document upon it.

The ink had been originally red, but in places it was faded almost to
illegibility. The worn edges at the folds showed how often it had been
opened and scanned. One lower corner h