concede your so excellent père was the ultimate word in discretion and sound judgment, but will you, for the love of kindly heaven, have the goodness to tell us all and let us judge for ourselves the value of the communication of which you speak?"
Eric regarded him with the slow grin he inherited from his father, then continued, quite unruffled, "Dad wasn't exactly what you'd call credulous, but he seemed to put considerable stock in the story, judging from his diary. Here it is." From the inside pocket of his dinner-coat he produced a small book bound in red leather and handed it to me. "Read the passages I've marked, will you please, Doctor," he asked. "I'm afraid I’d fill up if I tried to read Dad's writing aloud. He—he hasn't been gone very long, you know."
Adjusting my pince-nez, I hitched a bit nearer the library lamp and looked over the age-yellowed sheets covered with the fine, angular script of my old classmate!
8 Nov. 1898—Old Robinson is going fast. When I called to see him at the Seaman's Snug Harbor this morning I found him considerably weaker than he had been yesterday, though still in full possession of his faculties. There's nothing specifically wrong with the old fellow, save as any worn-out bit of machinery in time gets ready for the scrap-heap. He will probably go out sometime during the night, quite likely in his sleep, a victim of having lived too long.
"Doctor," he said to me when I went into his room this morning, "ye've been mighty good to me, a poor, worn-out old hulk with never a cent to repay all yer kindness; but I've that here which will make yer everlastin' fortune, providin' ye're brave enough to tackle it."
"That's very kind of you, John," I answered, but the old fellow was deadly serious.
"'Tis no laughin' matter, Doctor," he returned as he saw me smile. "'Tis th' truth an' nothin' else I'm fellin' ye—I'd 'a' had a go at it meself if it warn't that seafarin' men don't hold with disturbin' th' bones o' th' dead. But you, bein' a landsman, an' a doctor to boot, would most likely succeed where others have failed. I had it from my gran'ther, sir, an' he was an old man an' I but a lad when he gave it me, so ye can see 'tis no new thing I'm passin' on. Where he got it I don't know, but he guarded it like his eyes an' would never talk about it, not even to me after he'd give it to me."
With that he asked me to go to his ditty-box and take out a packet done up in oiled silk, which he insisted I take as partial compensation for all I'd done for him.
I tried to tell him the home paid my fee regularly, and that he was beholden to me for nothing, but he would not have it; so, to quiet the old man, I took the plan for my "everlastin' fortune" before I left.
9 Nov. 1898—Old John died last night, as I'd predicted, and probably went with the satisfied feeling that he had made a potential millionaire of the struggling country practitioner who tended him in his last illness. I must look into the mysterious packet by which he set such store. Probably it's a chart for locating some long-sunk pirate ship or unburying the loot of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, or some other old sea-robber. Sailormen a generation ago were full of such yarns, and recounted them so often they actually came to believe them.
10 Nov. '98—I was right in my surmise concerning old John's legacy, though it's rather different from the usual run of buried-treasure maps. Some day, when I've nothing else to do, I may go down to the old church in Harrisonville and actually have a try at the thing. It would be odd if poor Eric Balderson, struggling country practitioner, became a wealthy man overnight. What would I do first? Would a sealskin dolman for Astrid or a new side-bar buggy for me be the first purchase I'd make? I wonder.
"H'm," I remarked as I put down the book. "And this old seaman's legacy, as your father called it"
"Is here," Eric interrupted, handing me a square of ancient, crackling vellum on which a message of some kind had been laboriously scratched. The edges of the parchment were badly frayed, as though with much handling, though the indentures might have been the result of hasty tearing in the olden days. At any rate, it was a tattered and thoroughly decrepit sheet from which I read:
in ye name of ye most Holie Trinitie
