Whenever I carried a bag, I said to myself,
'Hurry up, now, with this bag of coal.' A ship-load of coal, you know, is
not worth enough to turn a man's head."
"That was not a bad idea," said the captain. "But now the work is done,
and we will soon get used to thinking of it without being excited about
it. There is absolutely no reason why we should not be as happy and
contented as if we had each made a couple of thousand dollars apiece on a
good voyage."
"That's so," said Shirley, "and I'm going to try to think it."
When the last bag had been put on board, Burke and the captain were
walking about the caves looking here and there to take a final leave of
the place. Whatever the captain considered of value as a memento of the
life they had led here had been put on board.
"Captain," said Burke, "did you take all the gold out of that mound?"
"Every bit of it," was the reply.
"You didn't leave a single lump for manners?"
"No," said the captain. "I thought it better that whoever discovered that
empty mound after us should not know what had been in it. You see, we
will have to circulate these bars of gold pretty extensively, and we
don't want anybody to trace them back to the place where they came from.
When the time comes, we will make everything plain and clear, but we will
want to do it ourselves, and in our own way."
"There is sense in that," said Burke.
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