Читать книгу The Mystery Lady - Robert William Chambers - Страница 7

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All the way to New York, Barney Welper was occupied in contriving a safe and sane way to possess himself of the documents which he had read sufficiently to realise that he wanted them.

But some blind, odd instinct led the boy to keep them upon his person night and day—not that it occurred to him to suspect Mr. Welper—

But, if he had anything at all of tangible value in those papers, he had a fortune! And so vast a fortune that it made him almost uncomfortable and slightly giddy to try to calculate what a ship loaded to the gunwales with “soft, pure, Indian gold” might be worth.

One thing in these pirate papers had instantly engaged the boy’s attention—the mention of False Cape, Tiger Island, and Place-of-Swans.

Because, westward from False Cape and across the sea-dunes, lay those vast inland fresh-water sounds and bays spreading through Virginia and North Carolina which he had known from earliest childhood.

And Place-of-Swans was the valuable island property inherited by his sister and himself from a sportsman father; and which, for two months every year, had been the family’s home in early winter.

Tiger Island was farther away—a place of no value for shooting, because for some reason neither duck, geese nor swan haunted the adjacent waters, nor ever had within the memory of living men.

To see False Cape and Place-of-Swans and Tiger Island mentioned by a bloody pirate in his own handwriting had thrilled the boy as he never before had been thrilled.

Suppose—but it would be sheer madness to suppose that the Red Moon, galley—And yet the boy understood that the first thing he meant to do on reaching New York was to sell enough stock in Orizava Oil to buy Tiger Island.

And now he began to recollect that in earliest childhood he had heard mention of the region as an ancient haunt of pirates.... There was the almost forgotten nursery legend of False Cape, and of the aged horse wandering all alone over the wintry dunes with a lighted lantern tied around his sagging neck.... And the boy now remembered to have heard his father speak of an ocean inlet which once existed somewhere to the eastward, and which now had filled up with a solid mile-wide barrier of snow-white sand, barring the salt sea water from the fresh.

So the long hours in the train wore away for the boy in the endless glamour of other days; for Mr. Welper in mousy cogitation.