"
"So you have stopped thinking the bags are all filled with anthracite
coal," said the captain.
"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.
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