thousand, and Michael two thousand. Aye, to be sure, Michael was in
it! He is in all I do, and is as good as men of ten times his birth
and history. Michael will be a rich man one day. In two years his
two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.

But those days when Biatt and I went treasure-ship hunting were not
without their trials. If we had failed, then no more could this
land have been home or resting-place for us. We should only have
been sojourners with no name, in debt, in disgrace, a pair of
braggart adventurers, who had worked a master-man of the island for
a ship, and money and men, and had lost all except the ship! Though
to be sure, the money was not a big thing--a, few hundred pounds;
but the ship was no flea-bite. It was a biggish thing, for it could
be rented to carry sugar--it was, in truth, a sugar-ship of four
hundred tons--but it never carried so big a cargo of sugar as it did
on the day when that treasure-box was brought to the surface of the
sea.

I'm bound to say this--one of the straightest men I ever met, liar
withal, was Cassandro Biatt. He took his jewels and vanished up the
seas in a flourish. He would not even have another try at the gold
in the bowels of the ship.

"I've got plenty to fill my paunch, and I'll go while I've enough.
It's the men not going in time that get left in the end"--that's
what he said.

And he was right; for other men went after the gold and got some of
it, and were caught by French and South American pirates and lost
all they had gained. Still another group went and brought away ten