The St. Johns herald., 1922-03-09

eIOuSIy d4lOWeu luem Dy lHe CdpIdlu
 boat putting off from the Bonny
 Lass, in which were captain, mate,
 and one Bill Halliwell, able seaman, a
 man of mighty muscle; and as freight an object large, angular and ponder
 ous, so that the boat Jagged heavily beneath the rowers' strokes.
 Later, Bill, the able seaman, grows hpresumptuous on the strength of
 this excursion with his betters. It is a word and a blow with the cap- tain of the BOnny Lass, and Bill is conveniently disposed of. Dead, as we'll as living, he serves the purpose of the captain. but of that later.
 Away sailed the Bonny Lass, sailing once for all out of the story. As for Captain Sampson, there is a long gap in his history, hazily filled by the story of his having been lieutenant to Benlto Bonito, and one of the two survivors when BOnito's black flag was brought down by the British frig- ate Espiegle. But sober history knows nothing of him until he reap pears years later, an aged and broken man, in a back street of Bristol. Here was living a certain Hopper down, who had been boatswain on the BOnny Lass at the time that che so regrettably lost her passengers over board. He saw and recognized his old skipper hobbling along the Bristol quays, and perhaps from pity took the shabby creature home with him. Hopperdown dealt in sailors slops. and had a snug room or two behind the shop. Here for a while the for mer Captain Sampson dwelt, and af- ter a swift illness here he died. With the hand of death upon hira, his grim lips at last gave up their secret. With stiffening fingers he traced a rough map, to refresh HOpperdown's mem- ory after the lapse of time since either had seen the wave-beaten cliffs of Leeward island. For Captain Sampson had never been able to re- turn to claim the treasure which he had left to Bill Halliwell's silent guardianship. If he had, indeed, sailed with Bonito, he had kept his secret from his formidable command CT. Even as he had dealt with Bill Halliwell, so might Bonito deal by him -or at least the lions share must be yielded to the pirate captain. And the passion of Captain Simpsons life had come to be his gold-his hidden hoo Ysf7 fo Nfp I NA fcIon6 IT. was his, now, all his. The only other who knew its hiding place, his for mer mate, had been killed in Havana in a tavern brawl. The secret of the bright unattainable treasure was all the captains own. He dreamed of the doubloons. gloated over them, longed for them with a ceaseless gnawing passion of desire. And in the end he died, in Hopperdown's lit tie shop in the narrow Bristol by street.
 HOpperdown, an aging man himself, and in his humble way cOntented, fell stralghtway victim to the gold-virus. He sold all he had, and bought pas sage in a sailing ship for Valparaiso, trusting that once so far on the way he would find means to accomplish the rest. But the raging of the fever in his thin old blood brought him to his bed, and the ship sailed without him. Before she was midway in the Allan tic HOpperdown was dead.
 The old man died in the house of niece, to whom by way of legacy he left his map. For years the map lay among other papers in a drawer, and here 1t was at length discovered by her son, himself sailor. He learned from her its history, and having been in the Pacific, and heard the tales and rumors that cling about Leeward island like the everlasting surf of its encompassing seas, this grand-nephew of old Hopperdown's, by name David Jenkins, became for the rest of his days a follower of the ignis fatuus. All his restless, hungry life he spent in wandering up and down the seas, ever on the watch for some dimly i'm agined chance by which he might come at the treasure. And so at last he wandered into the London hospital where he died.
 And to me the widest feature of the whole wild tale was that at the last he should have parted with the cher ished secret of a lifetime to Miss Higglesby-Browne.
 In a general way, every one of us knew his history. Even I had had an outline of 1t from Cuthbert vane.