Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/376

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HORN "Yes," said the other. "We are getting on toward the end of this voyage, and it is about time to give up that fancy. I always imagine, when I am near the end of a voyage, what I am going to do when I go ashore, and if I have any real right to some of the gold down under our decks, I shall do something very different from anything I ever did before."

"I hope you don't mean going on a spree," said Burke, who was standing near. "That would be something entirely different."

"I thought," said the captain, "that you both understood this business, but I don't mind going over it again. There is no doubt in my mind that this gold originally belonged to the Incas, who then owned Peru, and they put it into that mound to keep it from the Spaniards, whose descendants now own Peru, and who rule it without much regard to the descendants of the ancient Peruvians. Now, when I discovered the gold, and began to have an idea of how valuable the find was, I knew that the first thing to do was to get it out of that place and away from the country. Whatever is to be done in the way of fair play and fair division must be done somewhere else, and not there. If I had informed the government of what I had found, this gold would have gone directly into the hands of the descendants of the people from whom its original owners did their very best to keep it, and nobody else would have had a dollar's worth of it. If we had stood up for our rights to a reward for finding it, ten to one we would all have been clapped into prison." "I suppose by that," said Burke, "that you looked upon the stone mound in the cave as a sort of will left by those old Peruvians, and you made yourself an 362