The Pirate of Panama: A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure

It could have been no more than five minutes after I left her that Evelyn followed me to the upper deck saloon. Yet in the interval her nimble fingers had found time to garb her...

I am an outdoor man myself, but I have never seen the day when I was a match for Boris Bothwell at feats of strength. Unusually deep in the chest and wide of shoulder, with long...

"So have I, Jack. He was one of the sailors that took the _Santa Theresa_. Quinn gave a list of them in his story. This fellow must have escaped somehow when the ship was blown...

It was a dismal, sodden morning, with heavy clouds banked in the western sky. Rain had sloshed down since midnight so that the gutter in front of me was a turbid little river.

Dignity be hanged! I scudded down the beach as fast as my legs would carry me. Alderson had been left alone at the cache and my heart was in my throat.

Yeager was sitting with the ladies under the awning telling them some story of his beloved Arizona. At a signal from me he arose and excused himself. We passed into the receptio...

In the forenoon we drew out from the harbor and followed the shore line toward the southwest, bound for that neck of the Isthmus which is known loosely as The Darien.

It was in the afternoon of the day after our encounter with Bothwell--to be more accurate, just after four bells. Miss Wallace and I were sitting under the deck awning, she work...

Those of us left on board had a lazy time of it. I arranged watches of two to guard against any surprise on the part of the enemy either by an attack upon the yacht or by a sall...

Robert Wallace, the father of Evelyn, was not one of the forty-niners, but he had come to California by way of the Isthmus not very many years later. Always of an adventurous tu...

It was good to avoid the sun and the mosquitoes and the moist heat of the jungle, though I felt a little guilty at lying in a hammock on the shady side of the deck with Evelyn a...

Blythe and I had agreed that Bothwell would not let us get away without first making an effort to get hold of the original map of Doubloon Spit. He was nobody's fool, and there...

Southward ho! Before the trade winds we scudded day after day, past Catalina Island and San Diego, past Santa Margarita lying like a fog bank on the offing, out into the warm su...

I groped my way forward in the darkness till I came to a room used for storing purposes. Well up near the beams was a porthole. Too high for me to reach, I presently found a lar...

Darkness had fallen before we dropped anchor in the harbor of Panama. It was such a night as only the tropics can produce, the stars burning close and brilliant, the full moon r...

If I have given it with some detail, believe me, it is not because I care to linger over the shadow of tragedy that from the first hung about the ill-gathered treasure, but rath...

The captain and I were in the wheelhouse when the attack came. It must have been an hour past midnight of a gentle starry night, without the faintest breath of wind in the air....

This was the terrible story old Cap Nat, as he was commonly called, told to Robert Wallace one night in a grog shop at San Francisco nearly forty years after the events had take...

My opening eyes fell upon Evelyn. She was putting the last touches to the bandage on my arm, which was already dressed and bound. Evidently I had been unconscious some time.

Blythe and I had agreed that an attempt would be made to relieve us of the map while we were carrying it from the safety-deposit vault to the ship. So far as we could see it was...

Apparently there was no question of returning the mutineers to the irons from which we had freed them. Alderson, Smith, Neidlinger, and Higgins were grouped together on the fore...

"Sailors are a queer lot. They often get notions that have to be knocked out of them. We'll try not to disturb you while we do the hammering, Miss Berry."

We put into San Pedro in the early morning and tied up opposite the _Harvard_. Blythe and I ran up to Los Angeles on the electric, taking Jimmie Welch with us.

I fired through the window and brought down one fellow while they were still coming in a huddle toward us. Before I could fire again they were in the saloon and at close quarter...

The first impulse of the Arizonian had been to step out and end the campaign by a fighting finish with the Slav. But second thoughts brought wiser counsels. Blythe, called hurri...

Even now when it is only a memory I do not like to look back upon that twenty minutes. My poor girl was hysterical, but decided. Neither argument nor entreaty could move her fro...

The day before we sailed I spent an hour aboard the _Argos_ arranging my things in my cabin. While returning in one of the yacht's boats I caught sight through the fog of two fi...