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Five minutes later the clerk was back, this time with a message pencilled on the card. Regan grinned as he read it:

‘Dear Mr. Regan,

‘Honoured Sir:

‘I have the honour to inform you that I have a tip on the location of the treasure Sir Henry Morgan buried in old pirate days.

‘Alvarez Torres.’

Regan shook his head, and the clerk was nearly out of the room when his employer suddenly recalled him.

‘Show him in at once.’

In the interval of being alone, Regan chuckled to himself as he rolled the new idea over in his mind. ‘The unlicked cub!’ he muttered through the smoke of the cigar he was lighting. ‘Thinks he can play the lion part old R. H. M. played. A trimming is what he needs, and old Grayhead Thomas B. will see that he gets it.’

Señor Alvarez Torres’ English was as correct as his modish spring suit, and though the bleached yellow of his skin advertised his Latin-American origin, and though his black eyes were eloquent of the mixed lustres of Spanish and Indian long compounded, nevertheless he was as thoroughly New Yorkish as Thomas Regan could have wished.

‘By great effort, and years of research, I have finally won to the clue to the buccaneer gold of Sir Henry Morgan,’ he preambled. ‘Of course it’s on the Mosquito Coast. I’ll tell you now that it’s not a thousand miles from the Chiriqui Lagoon, and that Bocas del Toro, within reason, may be described as the nearest town. I was born there educated in Paris, however and I know the neighbourhood like a book. A small schooner the outlay is cheap, most very cheap but the returns, the reward the treasure!’

Señor Torres paused in eloquent inability to describe more definitely, and Thomas Regan, hard man used to dealing with hard men, proceeded to bore into him and his data like a cross-examining criminal lawyer.

‘Yes,’ Señor Torres quickly admitted, ‘I am somewhat embarrassed how shall I say? for immediate funds.’

‘You need the money,’ the stock operator assured him brutally, and he bowed pained acquiescence.

Much more he admitted under the rapid-fire interrogation. It was true, he had but recently left Bocas del Toro, but he hoped never again to go back. And yet he would go back if possibly some arrangement…

But Regan shut him off with the abrupt way of the masterman dealing with lesser fellow-creatures. He wrote a check, in the name of Alvarez Torres, and when that gentleman glanced at it he read the figures of a thousand dollars.

‘Now here’s the idea,’ said Regan. ‘I put no belief whatsoever in your story. But I have a young friend my heart is bound up in the boy but he is too much about town, the white lights and the white-lighted ladies, and the rest you understand?’ And Señor Alvarez Torres bowed as one man of the world to another. ‘Now, for the good of his health, as well as his wealth and the saving of his soul, the best thing that could happen to him is a trip after treasure, adventure, exercise, and… you readily understand, I am sure.’

Again Alvarez Torres bowed.