258 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



sound of one blow, and then the laboring breath of 

 the survivor as he strained and tugged to launch 

 the boat alone. 



At any rate, Keating seems to have been a 

 marked man and to have led but a sorry life mitil 

 he died. Those who did not shun him as a sus- 

 pected murderer, fawned upon him as the posses- 

 sor of the key to vast wealth who might be flattered 

 into sharing his secret. His second wife, years 

 younger than he, thought that in the course of 

 many curtain lectures she had surely obtained suf- 

 ficiently detailed information to enable her to find 

 the remaining gold without difficulty, but as will 

 be told later, her search came to nothing when she 

 finally reached Cocos many years after Keating's 

 death. In fact, what he told her led her to search on 

 a different side of the island from the place where 

 the treasure cave could be found, according to what 

 Keating confided to a man named Fitzgerald. 



Casting back and picking up the trail of Cha- 

 pelle, the second man of Benito's crew who es- 

 caped hanging, he left San Francisco in 1841, 

 bound for the South Seas, and was never heard 

 of again. Before leaving, he turned over to a 

 friend some papers, among them an extract from 

 the log of Benito's ship, indicating the location of 

 the treasure. This was the genesis of half a 

 dozen expeditions that at various times have fitted 

 out in San Francisco. 



When in May, 1925, the Arcturus spent ten days 

 at anchor in Chatham Bay, we found abundant 

 evidences of treasure-hunters. Rain-filled pits. 



