nough to
get him to Cuba, where he had new plans for advancement. And now, after
months of thought, I am following his advice; for no effort of the
creative mind, and no flight of conventional fancy, can equal the
weird, grim yarn that he reeled off between orders.

"You must have read in the papers a few weeks back," he began, "about
that bunch of college men that chartered the old racer _Mayflower_,
filled her up with diving gear and dynamite, and went down after the
treasure in the _Santa Margherita_."

I nodded assent. "Yes, and a hurricane hit them and they barely
escaped."

"They're keeping mum," he said, "and mean to try again; but it's no
use. That treasure is seven hundred miles to the nor-nor'east now, and
I was about the last man to look at it. It's resting in the hold of a
small schooner, sunk in four hundred fathoms. I never heard of that
treasure ship until about three years ago, when I quit a brigantine at
Cedar Keys and mixed in with the boarding-house crowd. There was a
fellow out of a job named Gleason, and he had a chart in his pocket
that he talked about, but never showed. He told us all about that old
Spanish ship that went down with all hands in the sixteenth century,
carrying with her about seven millions' worth of gold, silver, and
jewels; and he knew the location. He had got it from a drunken diver
who had seen her on the sea bottom, spelled her dingy old name on the
stern, and saved the news to himself while he wormed out of the skipper
the latitude and longitude of the place. And now he wanted to enlist
capital, or make up a crew of men that would do the work. Dead easy, he
said. Just to get there, drag the bottom with two boats and a length of
chain until the wreck was located, then to go down in a diving suit,
hook on to the chests and hoist them up.

"Well, in the crowd that he talked to there wasn't a dollar. We were
all dead broke, but we were all ambitious. There was Pango Pete, a
nigger six foot tall, who couldn't write his name, but he was a seaman
from his feet up; and a Dago named Pedro Pasqualai. These two were the
kind that will choke you before they ask the time of night. Then there
was Sullivan, old man Sullivan, a decrepit old codger who had sailed
second mate all his life, and never got a first mate's berth because he
couldn't master navigation. And there was Peters, a young fellow filled
up with the romance and the glory of the life at sea--rot, as you and I
know, but he