“You don’t say!” he exclaimed, his avaricious old eyes lighting up. “And here have I been running this yacht up and down these parts for five years at a dead loss!” His disgust would have been comic, were it not for the ugly, ruthless lust of gold which looked suddenly out of his face. “Guess I’m going to quit this fooling around right away! I don’t know and don’t care if it was the Devil himself wrote this specification in Pauline’s book--I’m darned sure she didn’t write it herself--the handwriting’s different, d’you see?”--It was, as a matter of fact, compared with the previous pages, quite another hand--hers was an upright, rounded schoolgirl calligraphy, this was a cursive old-fashioned script inclined well forward. “So as we’ve got nothing else to start upon, we may as well see if there’s anything to it.” He tossed Geoffrey’s transcription across to me. “What do you make of it, young man?” he asked, with the sneering condescension he accorded to my superior literary attainments.
I took it, rather amused at the old scoundrel’s simplicity. That there was any authentic meaning in Pauline’s scrawl seemed to me wildly improbable. I was a frank materialist in those days and had Carpenter’s formula of “unconscious cerebration” glibly ready to cover up anything psychologically abnormal. However, I considered the sheet of paper with attention.
“Assuming this to be a genuine message,” I said, “it would appear to give the precise latitude and longitude of some point where it is desirable to dig. I take it that the figures stand for 13 degrees 24 minutes North, 81 degrees 27 minutes West. The world ‘_lucia_’ puzzles me--unless the island of St. Lucia is meant. What ‘_katalina_’ stands for, I do not know--it is evidently a proper name of some kind, ‘_sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge_’ presumably means that one should dig under three trees south-west-by-south of Skull Point--wherever that is. ‘_jno dawson_’ is, of course, John Dawson. Assuming this to be a spirit-message from the other world,” I could not help smiling ironically, “it is possibly the name of the ghost who is communicating--and who desires to indicate to some person that it is his or her turn. He does not specify for what. I may remark that the ghost is either ill-educated or he has an archaic taste in spelling.”