Frederick Whishaw - Clutterbuck's Treasure

Then that clerk nearly had a fit, because Jack and I manifested the wildest delight and roared with laughter; I am not sure that we did not execute a step or two of an improvised skirt dance. The clerk smilingly observed presently that if we were in hopes that somebody we expected in the Chepstow Castle was going down to the bottom, or anything of that sort, it was his duty to disappoint us, because the steamer was all right and perfectly safe, and would arrive this evening.

"Oh no," said Jack very heartlessly; "our rich uncles and aunts are not on board!"

"I thought they must be," said the clerk, "as you seemed so pleased to hear of the ship's accident." He eyed us as though doubts as to our sanity had begun to dawn in his mind.

"Why, man," said Jack, "we are passengers ourselves—that's the joke of it!"

"Passengers on board what ship?" asked the clerk.

"The Chepstow Castle " exclaimed Jack.

Then the doubts as to our sanity which had dawned in that clerk's mind ripened into certainty, and he began to look about for a safe place; he also grasped his ruler in case of emergency, resolved, no doubt, to sell his life dearly.

"We got out at Las Palmas," I explained. I made the remark in sympathetic sorrow for that clerk's agony of mind. But my explanation did not reassure him much.

"You can't be in two places at once," he said. "If you got out at Las Palmas, you are there still. Besides, if you got out you surely knew enough to get in again?"

"We'd have got in again if we could," I said, "but we missed the boat and had to come on by the Panther , which arrived this morning. Here are our tickets—they will prove that we started by the Chepstow Castle ."

The clerk examined our tickets and wiped his forehead; then he looked us over, laughed almost as loud as we did, and said it was rather funny that we should have turned up first after all. If he had known what a poor joke it was for some others on board the Chepstow Castle , I daresay he would have laughed still more. As it was, he entered so heartily into the spirit of the thing that he obtained permission for us to board the steamer in the company's tug so soon as the ship should arrive in sight, a permission which we were right glad to have, because we were somewhat anxious as to our property on board, in case certain persons should have found means during our absence to possess themselves of that which was not theirs.

There was also another reason for our desire to go on board in the darkness and unexpected. We desired to do a little spiritualism in real life, and to appear before our friends the Strongs in the morning as though we had never left the ship.

"Nothing like playing the ghost for getting at the truth of things," said Jack, as we left the office. "We shall see by the rascals' faces, when they catch sight of us, whether it was really they who fired the shots at us!"

That shipping clerk was of the greatest service to us in another way, for he gave us much excellent advice as to how best to proceed in our journey up-country, what natives to engage, how many oxen to purchase, and the best kind of waggon, together with a quantity of other useful information as to roads and the chances of sport to be obtained. It was dusk by the time the Chepstow Castle arrived in the offing, and we boarded her during the dinner-hour, when of passengers there were none on deck. Captain Eversley was on duty, however, and our ghostly reappearance began propitiously with that cordial officer, who first stared at us in a bewildered manner and afterwards burst into laughter.

"Well, you are nice sort of young fellows," he said; "you ought to be still vegetating at the Grand Canary if you had your deserts! What became of you?—lose yourselves?"

"Caught by tide," Jack explained, "and brought on by a freighter."

"Come for your things, I suppose?" said the captain. "All right; I had them removed from your cabin because two second-class passengers asked to be allowed to pay the difference and come in when there was room. The steward has your property. They're all at dinner below; you'd better join them—they'll take you for ghosts."

"Who are the fellows in our cabin?" I inquired.

"Brothers, I believe, called Smith," said Eversley. "They have a friend among the second-classers; they have not been popular among the state-room people. We have wished you back more than once."

We thanked the captain and retired, as he had suggested, below. Here our sudden appearance caused first a dead silence of amazement, followed by the uproar of a dozen or two tongues speaking at once; and then, to add to the dramatic interest of the situation, one of the passengers rose from his seat at the lower end of the table as though to leave the room, uttered a kind of groan, and fainted. I saw him and recognised him in a moment—it was Charles Strong. His brother, seated beside him, quickly dragged his unconscious relative away.

A word or two of explanation soon convinced our late fellow-travellers that we were not ghosts, and in order to reassure them more fully as to our substantiality we both sat down and made a remarkably good dinner. I am sorry to say that it was the unanimous opinion of all present that, had we been still looking out for a sail at Las Palmas instead of comfortably dining almost within the harbour of Cape Town, we should have had nothing but our own foolishness to thank for it.

As for the Strongs, or Smiths, no one had a good word to say for them. They never spoke, we were told, at meals, and they spent all their time conspiring and whispering together over maps and papers on the second-class deck, where they had a fellow-mystery. They were set down by universal consent as miners or gold-diggers who had received a "tip" as to some rich spot, which they intended to find and exploit. Universal consent had not made such a very bad guess, as it turned out.

When we went to claim our property afterwards from the steward's pantry—which we did in some anxiety, seeing who our successors in the cabin had been (for we naturally concluded that the Strongs would not have paid money for the pleasure of occupying our berths unless they had had designs upon something we might have left there), we missed my small handbag.

"Were these new fellows in the cabin before our things were removed?" we asked of the steward.

"Oh no, sir," said that functionary; "one of them looked in to see if it would suit, but he wasn't there five minutes; you wouldn't surely suspect the gentleman of"—

"Oh dear, no!" I said, "certainly not, steward; probably my little bag escaped your notice and his too. Go and ask for it, like a good man; it was under the sofa when we were in the cabin, and it's probably there now."

The steward went off on his mission somewhat flustered; for it was a reflection upon his carefulness that the bag had been left behind. When I said that it might have escaped Strong's notice as well as his own, I really meant what I said, though the sceptical Jack grinned at my "innocence," as he called it. The bag contained, as Jack knew, a few exceedingly important articles—namely, my slender stock of ready money (about thirty-five pounds), a copy of the all-important map and instructions for finding Clutterbuck's treasure, my revolver, and a few other things of less importance.

Nevertheless, when the steward brought the bag to me a few minutes later with "Mr. Smith's" apology, and declared that the latter gentleman said that neither he nor his brother had seen or touched it, I believed him. I was the more disposed to acquit the Strongs when I opened the bag and found money, map, revolver, and everything else still within it just as I had left them; but subsequent events proved that Jack's scepticism was in the right after all, though we did not discover this until later.