I rose at dawn, but my host was out before me. He had left two fish cleaned and ready for cooking on a plate outside the door. Having breakfasted, I started on a walk around the atoll, which I estimated I could accomplish in about an hour. I expected to meet the Englishman somewhere on the way, and I did find him on the opposite side of the lagoon. The shore was steep-to there. He had a steel-tipped rod in his hand and was diving off a ledge of rock, remaining below for as long as a full minute. He waved when he saw me, but kept on with his work. In about a quarter of an hour he came over to where I was standing.
"Tiresome work," he said. "I need a blow." Then, "You see, I\'ve been doing a bit of digging here."
I had walked along the lagoon beach and had not noticed before the series of trenches higher up the land. I should think he had been digging! I inspected the ditches under his guidance. There were three at least a quarter of a mile in length each and from three to four feet deep. These ran in parallel lines and were about four paces apart. Fifteen to twenty shorter trenches cut through them at right angles.
329 The sun was well above the horizon. We lit our pipes and sat down in the shade. After a few moments of silence he said: "I suppose you know what I\'m doing here? If you have been in Papeete you must have heard. There is no secret about it—at least not any longer."
I said that I had left Papeete shortly after my arrival. I had spent several idle afternoons on the veranda of the Bougainville Club, but in the talk which went around there I didn\'t remember having heard of Pinaki.
"So much the better," he said. "Yes, seven years is a long time, and I\'m not keen about feeding gossip; but when I first came down here there was a clacking of tongues from one end of the group to the other. I believe I have since earned the reputation of being rather queer. I thought you must know. The fact is I\'m looking for treasure. Would you care to hear the story?"
"Very much," I said, "if it won\'t bore you to tell it."
"On the contrary, it will be something of a relief. Seven years of digging, with nothing to show for it, must strike an outsider as a mad business. Sometimes I\'m half persuaded that I am a complete fool to go on with the search. But you can\'t possibly know the fascination of it. It seems only yesterday that I came here. As you see for yourself, it\'s not much of an island. And to know that there is a treasure of more than three million pounds buried somewhere in this tiny circle of scrub and palm—"
"But do you know it?" I asked.
"I\'m as sure of it as that I am smoking your tobacco. That is, I am sure it was buried here. Whether it has 330 been removed since, I can\'t say, of course. The natives at Nukatavake remember a white man whom they called Luta, who came here about twenty years ago and remained for something over a month. One of the four men who stole the gold and brought it to Pinaki was a man named Luke Barrett, and it may have been he who came back, although he was supposed to have been killed in Australia forty years ago. It is the uncertainty which makes this such killing work at times. But when I think of giving it up—you would have to live with the thought of treasure for seven years, and to dream at night of finding it, before you could understand." He rose suddenly. "If you don\'t mind a short walk, I will show you something rather interesting."
We went along the lagoon beach for several hundred yards, then crossed toward the ocean side. Near the center of the island we came upon an immense block of coral broken from the reef and carried there by some great storm of the past. Cut deeply into the face of the rock I saw a curious design:
Curious Design
I asked what it meant.
"Man, if I knew that! I believe it\'s the key, and I can\'t master it! But we may as well sit down and be comfortable. If you would really care to hear the story from the beginning it will take the better part of an hour. I\'ll not give you all the details; but when I have finished you will be in a position to judge for yourself whether or not I was mad in coming here.
"Have you ever read Walker\'s book, Undiscovered Treasure? It doesn\'t matter, except that you have missed a very entertaining volume. It is a pity that 331 old work is out of print. Nothing in it but bare facts about all sorts of treasure supposed to have been buried here and there about the world. You might think it would be dry, but I found it better company than any romance I\'ve ever read. However, that has nothing to do with this story, except in an indirect way. I first read the book as a boy and it started me on my travels.
"To me the facts about this Pinaki treasure are as interesting as any of Walker\'s. He, of course, knew nothing about it, for it had not been stolen when his book was published. Four men had a hand in the business: a Spaniard named Alvarez; an Irishman named Killorain; and two others of uncertain nationality, Luke Barrett, whom I spoke of a moment ago, and Archer Brown. They were a thieving, murdering lot by all accounts—adventurers of the worst sort; and in hope of plunder, I suppose, had joined the Peruvian army during the war with Chile in eighteen fifty-nine to sixty. Their hopes were realized beyond all expectations. They got wind of some gold buried under the floor of a church, and the strange thing was that the gold was there and they found it. It was in thirty-kilo ingots, contained in seven chests, the whole lot worth in the neighborhood of three and a half million pounds. How they managed to get away with it I don\'t know; but I have investigated the business pretty thoroughly and I have every reason to believe that they did. They buried it again in the vicinity of Pisco, and then set out in search of a vessel. Alvarez was the only one of the four who had any education. They had all followed the sea at one time or another, but he alone knew how to navigate. The 332 others could hardly write their own names. At Panama they signed on as members of the crew of a small schooner, and as soon as they had put to sea knocked the captain and the two other sailors in the head and chucked them overboard. They returned to Pisco, loaded the gold, and started for Paumotus.
"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine. In the December following they landed at Pinaki, where they buried the treasure. The island was uninhabited then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to learn the name of it. The natives were shy, but they persuaded one man to approach, and when they had the information they wanted, shot him and rowed out to their boat. If you should go to Nukatavake you will find two old men there who still remember the incident.
"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel not far from Cooktown, and went ashore with a story of shipwreck. They had some of the gold with them—not much in proportion to the amount of the treasure, but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for the rest of their lives. It soon went, and the four were next heard of at the Palmer gold fields. Alvarez and Barrett were both supposed to have been killed there in a fight with some blacks. Brown and Killorain had not mended their ways to any extent, and both were finally jerked up for manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years\' penal servitude. Brown died in prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally died in Sydney hospital in nineteen twelve.
"Most of these facts—if they are facts—I had from Killorain himself the night before he died. I met him in a curious way; or, better, the meeting came as the 333 result of a curious combination of circumstances. You may have noticed the scar on my side?"
I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges where the flesh had healed, tapering to a point in the middle of his back.
"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it gave me a deal of trouble at the time. I got it in New Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I was prospecting for gold in the back country. I was a long way from a settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head to stick me with a spear. I suppose he wanted my gun and ammunition, for I had little else excepting my placer outfit. I let him have one bullet from my Colt just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for all I know he may be lying there to this day. I have that little frizzly headed native to thank for my knowledge of the Pinaki treasure. Sometimes I am sorry that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting was altogether too easy a death for the man really responsible for bringing me here. I was in a bad way from the wound. Infection set in, and I had to nurse myself somehow and get down to a place where I could have medical attention. I managed it, but the ten days\' journey was a nightmare. I was nothing but skin and bone when I left the hospital, and New Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the doctor recommended me to go to Australia.
"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and a half of heart-breaking work in the mountains. Most of it went for the hospital bill, and when I reached Sydney I had very little left. I was compelled to put up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although the woman who kept it was quite a decent sort. Her 334 house was in a poor quarter of the town and her patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters. It was a wretched life for her, but she had two children to support and was making the best of a bad job. I admired her pluck and did what I could in a small way to help her out.
"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen when some one rapped. Before I could go to the door, it opened, and an old man came stumbling in, asking for something to eat. I thought he was drunk and was about to hustle him back the way he came when I noticed that he was wet through—it was a cold, rainy night—and really suffering from exposure and lack of food. I made him remove his coat—he had nothing on under it—but not without a great deal of trouble, and he insisted on drying it across his knees. He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman, about five feet three or............