There were soldiers in the boat. They were looking for an escaped criminal, a renegade. As the boat started to pull away they backed on their oars and the officer in command called back. "There will be a reward ... five hundred pesos ... alive!"
"Whoever he is," the Tinker had said, "they want him badly, to pay that much. And they want him alive. He knows something, Captain."
"That he does," said a voice, speaking from the sea. And then an arm reached up, caught the chains, and pulled its owner from the dark water. He crouched there in the chains for a moment to catch his breath, then reached up and pulled himself to the top of the bowsprit, and came down to the deck. He was a big man, splendidly built, and naked to the waist as well as bare-footed.
"That I do, gentlemen," he had said quietly. "I know enough to make us all rich."
He was talking for his life, or at least for his freedom, and he knew he must catch their attention at once. There on the deck, the water dripping from him, he told them enough to convince them.
And to his arguments he added one even more convincing-- a Spanish gold piece, freshly minted.
By that time they were in the Captain's own cabin, a pot of coffee before them. The stranger dropped the gold coin on the table, then pushed it toward them with his forefinger. "Look at it," he said. "It's a pretty thing--and where that comes from, there's a million of them."
Not a million dollars--a million of such coins, each of them worth many dollars.
There in the cabin of the brig, the three men sat about the Captain's table--Jonas Locklear, the Tinker, and the man who was to become my father, Falcon Sackett. Jonas was the only one who was past twenty-five, but the story they heard that night was to affect a change in all their lives.
Thirty-odd years before, Jean LaFitte, pirate and slave trader, was beating north along the Gulf coast with two heavily laden treasure ships. During a gale one of these ships was driven ashore, its exact position unknown.
LaFitte believed, or professed to believe, that the vessel had gone ashore on Padre Island, that very long, narrow island that parallels many miles of the Gulf coast of Texas. As a matter of fact, the ship had gone ashore some sixty miles south of Padre.
Five men, and five only, made it to shore.
Of these, one died within a matter of hours of injuries sustained during the wreck, and a second was slain by roving Karankawa Indians while struggling through the brush just back from the shore.
The three who reached a settlement were more thirsty than wise. Staggering exhausted into the tiny village, rain-soaked and bedraggled, coming from out of nowhere, they hurried to the cantina, where they proceeded to get roaring drunk on the gold they carried in their pockets.
They woke up in prison.
The commandant at the village was both a greedy and cruel man, and the three drunken sailors carried in their pockets more than three hundred dollars ... a veritable fortune at that place and time.
Upon a coast where tales of buried treasure and lost galleons are absorbed with the milk of the mother, this gold could mean but one thing: the three sailors had stumbled upon such a treasure and could be, by one means or another, persuaded to tell its location.
The commandant had no idea with what kind of men he dealt, for the three were pirates and tough men, accustomed to hardship, pain, and cruelty. They were also realistic. They knew that as soon as the commandant knew what they knew, he would no longer have any need for them. They wanted the gold, and they wanted to live, and both these things were at stake.
So they kept their secret well. They denied knowing anything of pirate treasure ... they had won the money playing cards in Callao, in Peru.
Much of what they were asked could be denied with all honesty, for the commandant was positive they had stumbled upon gold long buried, and never suspected that they themselves might have brought the gold to the shores of Mexico.
Under the torture one man died, and the commandant grew frightened. If the others died, he might never learn their secret. Torture, then, was not the answer.
He would get them drunk. Under the influence, they would talk.
The trouble was, he underestimated their capacity, and overestimated that of himself and his guards. He judged their capacity by the effect of the first drinks, not realizing they had been taken on stomachs three days empty of food.
The result was that he got drunk, his guards got drunk, and the prisoners escaped. And before they escaped they cleaned out the pockets of the commandant and his guards, as well as the office strongbox (their own gold had been hidden elsewhere), and then they fled Mexico.
The border was close and they nearly killed their horses reaching it. Splashing across the Rio Grande, alternately wading or swimming, they arrived in Texas.
The year was 1816.
Texas was still Mexico, so they stole horses and headed northeast for Louisiana. En route one of the three men was killed by Indians, and now only two remained who knew exactly where the gold lay, and each was suspicious of the other.
Knowing where a treasure is, is one thing; going there to get it, quite another. Financing such a wildcat venture is always a problem; moreover, a "cover" is needed in the event the authorities ask what you are doing there. And there is always the question: who can be trusted?
Both men intended to go back at once, either together or each by himself, but neither could manage it.
Both were out of funds, which meant work, and their work was on the sea. So they went to sea, on separate ships, and neither ever saw the other again. Each knew where there was a vast treasure in gold, but it lay upon a lonely coast where strangers were at once known as such, and the local commandant was greedy ... and aware of the treasure's existence.
Then the year was 1846, and General Zachary Taylor had invaded northern Mexico and was winning victories, but was desperately in need of supplies. Steamboats were active on the Rio Grande, ferrying supplies across from the anchorage at Brazos Santiago to the waiting steamboats at Boca del Rio. The steamboats that could navigate off the coast drew too much water for the river, so all goods must be transferred.
In command of one of those waiting boats was Captain Falcon Sackett.
The war with Mexico offered opportunity for any number of adventurers, outlaws, and ne'er-d-wells, who came at once to the mouth of the river--ffMatamoras, Brownsville, Bagdad, and the coastal villages. Two of these were men with one idea: under cover of the disturbance and confusion of war, to slip down to the coast and get away with the gold.
One was the last actual survivor of the original five; the second was the son of the other survivor. The first, Duval, was an old man now. He found his way to Boca del Rio, where he sought out and secured a job as cook on Falcon Sackett's steamboat. Duval was a tough old man, and luckily for the men on the steamboat, an excellent cook.
Eric Stouten was twenty-four, a veteran of several years at sea, and a fisherman for some years before that. But when he found his way to Mexico it was as an enlistee in the cavalry assigned to the command of Captain Elam Kurbishaw.
Striking south on a foraging expedition, Captain Kurbishaw led his men into the village where once, long ago, the survivors from the treasure ship had come. That night, just before sundown, Trooper Stouten requested permission to speak to the commanding officer.
Captain Elam Kurbishaw was a tall, cool, desperate man. A competent field commander, he was also a man ready to listen to just such a proposal as Stouten had to offer.
Within the hour the commandant of the village was arrested, his quarters ransacked, and the old report of the interrogation of the prisoners found. With it was a single gold piece ... kept as evidence that what was recorded there had, indeed, transpired.