had come to be his gold--his hidden hoard on far-off Leeward
Island. It was his, now, all his. The only other who knew its
hiding-place, his former mate, had been killed in Havana in a
tavern brawl. The secret of the bright unattainable treasure was
all the captain's 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 little shop in the narrow
Bristol by-street.

Hopperdown, an aging man himself, and in his humble way contented,
fell straightway victim to the gold-virus. He sold all he had, and
bought passage 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
Atlantic Hopperdown was dead.

The old man died in the house of a niece, to whom by way of legacy
he left his map. For the satisfaction of his anxious mind, still
poring on the treasure, she wrote down what she could grasp of his
instructions, and then, being an unimaginative woman, gave the
matter little further heed. For years the map lay among other
papers in a drawer, and here it was at length discovered by her
son, himself a 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_.
An untaught, suspicious, grasping man, he rejected, or knew not how
to set about, the one course which offered the least hope, which