About the treasure, almost everything he said was new
to her. Mrs. Cliff was very eager on this point. She wanted every detail.
"How about the ownership of it?" she said. "After all, that is the
great point. What do people here think of your right to use that gold
as your own?"
The captain smiled. "That is not an easy question to answer, but I think
we shall settle it very satisfactorily. Of course, the first thing to do
is to get it safely entered and stored away in the great money centres
over here. A good portion of it, in fact, is to be shipped to
Philadelphia to be coined. Of course, all that business is in the hands
of my bankers. The fact that I originally sailed from California was a
great help to us. To ascertain my legal rights in the case was the main
object of my visit to London. There Wraxton and I put the matter before
three leading lawyers in that line of business, and although their
opinions differed somewhat, and although we have not yet come to a final
conclusion as to what should be done, the matter is pretty well
straightened out as far as we are concerned. Of course, the affair is
greatly simplified by the fact that there is no one on the other side to
be a claimant of the treasure, but we consider it as if there were a
claimant, or two of them, in fact. These can be no other than the present
government of Peru, and that portion of the population of the country
which is native to the soil, and the latter, if our suppositions are
correct, are the only real heirs to the treasure which I discovered.
Pages:
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439