"Then it wasn't merely a sick fancy of your brother's?"
"Indeed no, it—" Rosa broke off to exclaim, "O'Reilly, you are looking at me!"
"But you gave me the signal to look," he protested.
"Nothing of the sort; you placed your fingers upon my lips." There was a moment of silence during which the lovers were oblivious to all but each other, then Rosa murmured: "How strange! Sometimes your eyes are blue and sometimes gray. Does that mean that your love, too, can change?"
"Certainly not. But come, what about Esteban and that doubloon?"
With an effort the girl brought herself back to earth. "Well, it occurred to me, in the light of that dream last night, that Esteban may have been right. Of course nobody outside of our family credits the old story, and yet my father was considered a very rich man at one time. Pancho Cueto believed in the existence of the treasure, and he was in a position to know."
"True! Perhaps, after all—" O'Reilly frowned meditatively.
Rosa lifted herself upon her elbow, her eyes sparkling. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were true? Just think, O'Reilly, cases of Spanish gold, silver coins in casks, packages of gems. Oh, I've heard Isabel talk about it often enough!"
"Don't forget those pearls from the Caribbean, as large as plums," Johnny smiled. "I could never quite swallow that. A pearl the size of a currant would buy our freedom right now." After a moment he went on, more seriously: "I've a notion to look into that old well this very afternoon. I—I dare say I'm foolish, but—somehow the story doesn't sound so improbable as it did. Perhaps it is worth investigating—" He made up his mind swiftly. "I—I'm off this very instant."
When O'Reilly emerged from the hut he found Jacket industriously at work over a fragment of grindstone which he had somewhere unearthed. The boy looked up at his friend's approach and held out for inspection a long, thin file, which he was slowly shaping into a knife-blade.