Nicky’s delayed answer.

“Come! Answer! Why were you among the islands?”

“I was trying to figure out why we were there,” Nicky replied, a candid look on his face. “You see, we had the ‘flu’ back at our school and we went to Jamaica to join this boy’s father—” he made a gesture toward Cliff and continued. “A young fellow was helping Cliff’s father collect old relics of the Indians and he brought us up to those islands in a sloop with a colored pilot—just for a lark on our part. I think he meant to get a canoe and maybe take us with him up the Harney River to the edge of the Everglades—or into them, to collect some things from the Seminoles.” That was a part of Mr. Neale’s plan, if they did not find the treasure, or, perhaps, even if they did; so Nicky told the truth, though not all of it. Cliff unclasped his hands as if signifying that Nicky had done well.

“Si—yes, that is reasonable,” commented the tall man. “What then?”

Tom made no gesture, which Nicky correctly judged to mean that as long as he had told the man by the companionway about the can and the parchment he might as well repeat the story. He did.

“Does that agree, Tew, with what they told you?”

At the name, Tew, Nicky started a little. In the early days of piracy, as his studies had told him, one of the most notorious of the old sea barons, Thomas Tew, had made piratical history; could this man be a descendant? Could he be filled with the same daring and ferocity?

“It agrees, cap’n,” responded Tew. Don Ortiga leaned back, tapping the arm of his chair nervously while he thought.

The chums sat in silence, their three pairs of arms folded in sign that they were still in secret communion and waiting. After a long silence during which he considered them shrewdly, the Spaniard spoke.

“I do not believe it! Do you, Tew?”

“Sounds ‘fishy’ to me,” answered the apelike fellow. “First of all, them three trees on that little key ain’t more’n fifty years old. And my folks, and Nelse’s folks, has lived about these waters for more time’n that and there ain’t been no treasure buried that I ever heard of—not in the last fifty years!”

“So! Again, Tew,” the Don ignored his young captives in the intentness of some point he was trying to make, “again, a tin can would have rusted away and crumbled, 

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