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David Hume Moral and Political Theorist 1st Edition
Hardin Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Hardin, Russell
ISBN(s): 9780199232567, 0199232563
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.72 MB
Year: 2007
Language: english
David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist
This page intentionally left blank
David Hume:
Moral and Political Theorist

Russell Hardin

1
1
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ISBN 978-0-19-923256-7

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Patrick Suppes
Humean by nature, sorely missed friend on a distant coast
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

When we read any theorist, and perhaps especially when a philosopher reads
another philosopher, we often tend to take a strong critical stance and to
pick the theorist apart. I have taken the view here that Hume’s work should
be considered from within. That is to say, if I find something that seems
contrary or inconsistent, I struggle to give Hume the benefit of the doubt and
to suppose I might actually be wrong. I have tried to have as nearly Hume’s
sensibility as I might be capable of, so that I attempt to read him without
corrections that I think he would not have wanted to make and could have
argued against. This often calls for generosity of interpretation. Fortunately, I
find Hume’s philosophical views and what I will call his social science very
congenial, so that my generosity is not severely tested by the attempt to read
Hume’s arguments as I think he would read them.
Much of what he says is in a vocabulary that is not fully ours, and this for
two reasons. First, Hume has such original and lively ideas that he often has
to coin a vocabulary to cover them. He then does what theorists perhaps most
often do: he borrows from the vernacular. But he gives the vernacular terms a
precision and specificity that they do not have in the vernacular and probably
have never had. His vernacular words cover some of his most important terms:
sympathy, artificial, utility, convention.
Second, much of the vocabulary grows out of philosophical jargon of the
century leading up to Hume. Hume adopts some of this jargon but often with
a big twist, as in his use of the notion of virtue and the virtues. Some of the
jargon is embedded in social and religious views that many of us do not merely
not share, we cannot even, in Hume’s term, feel sympathy for those who once
held such views. To read the philosophers who set the table for Hume would
require even more generosity than I mean to offer to Hume, more generosity
than most of us could muster while reading views that are often objectionable
and even outrageous with, for example, claims that some awful prejudice is in
fact the product of reason.
There is another, perhaps even harder obstacle to reading Hume with any
ease. His moral psychology and his social science are highly original and are a
couple of centuries ahead of their time in that almost no one grasped many of
his theoretical claims until recent decades. I address his basic psychological and
strategic theories in chapters 2 and 3, respectively.
viii david hume: moral and political theorist

For almost all of the arguments here, I attempt to give license from Hume
by citing where he specifically says what I claim is his view. One can readily
bias any case by omitting passages that go against one’s interpretation. And one
cannot readily show that the general tenor of some part of the work is what
one says it is. I trust that if I have omitted important contrary passages or if I
have misread the tenor of Hume’s work, I will be corrected. Someone writing
fifty years ago on Hume’s political thought could not have been so confident
of being corrected. Political theorists should be glad of the growing attention
to Hume and to its concomitant chance of criticism.
There is only one context in which I do not take Hume’s statements as part
of his theory, and that is when the statements are, by his own critical judgment,
what he calls panegyric or, when they are longer, sallies of panegyric. I think
it clear that he does not mean these statements of praise of substantive moral
principles or of actions that have seemingly moral consequences to be part of
his theory. Having the emotivist views in such panegyrics is predictable from
his theory, and he has approbations of many things, just as his psychological
theory says people must have. It would be odd if he held himself above his
own social scientific theory, and he does not. But his approbations are not part
of the content of a theory of morality.
Finally, two bibliographic notes. First, citations to Hume’s two major works
on morals follow the current practices of Hume Studies. Citations to the Treatise
of Human Nature are in text and follow the format: (T3.2.2.9, SBN 489),
where 3 is book 3; 2 is part 2; 2 is section 2; 9 is the paragraph number within
section 2 as given in the version of the Treatise edited by Norton and Norton
for the Clarendon Critical Edition of the works of Hume; and SBN 489 is the
page number in the edition of Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, which was long the
standard for work on Hume. Citations to the Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals are of the form (EPM2.3, SBN 177), where 2 is section 2; 3 is the
paragraph number in the edition edited by Beauchamp; and again SBN 177
is the page number in the edition of Selby-Bigge and Nidditch. Citations to
the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) follow a similar format.
The somewhat random numbering of some paragraphs in SBN is not noted
in the citations. All other works are cited in brief form in footnotes and
more fully in the list of references. Citations to other traditional works that
appear in many editions often follow roughly in the format of these works of
Hume.
Second, I have cited many of Hume’s shorter essays. About half of these
essays are on political topics. The topics are quite varied and they do not present
a systematic account of politics. Several are on economic topics, primarily about
 preface ix

free trade and open markets, and several of these are acute and insightful in their
economic principles. The longest of the essays is a historiographical discussion
of the populousness of ancient nations; it displays Hume’s empirical method
at its best. The remainder of the essays are on literary and diverse other topics
not especially relevant to the present book.
Acknowledgements

I wish to thank several classes over twenty years—at Chicago, New York
University, and Stanford—for opportunity to explore Hume’s and others’
arguments toward an eventual plan to write such a book as this. I especially
thank participants in my Stanford seminar on Hume during spring quarter
2003. Debates in that seminar were superb and I regretted the end of term that
ended the discussions. I also thank the University of Bayreuth for sponsoring
five lectures on Hume under the broad canopy of the annual Wittgenstein
Lectures. I especially thank Rainer Hegselmann for inviting me to give those
lectures and then for being one of the world’s greatest hosts for a full week of
lecturing, eating, and hiking. His colleagues and students made the week of
lecturing and meeting with discussion colloquiums challenging and exciting. I
am daunted at the thought of listening, as many of them did, to one person
speaking for upwards of twelve hours in a single week.
For energetic research assistance, I thank Paul-Aarons Ngomo, Andrea
Pozas-Loyo, and Huan Wang at New York University and Mariel Ettinger
at Stanford; from an earlier time I also thank Paul Bullen at Chicago for his
assistance. I admire the resourcefulness, intensity, and commitment of all these
wonderful people. They have all creatively got themselves into the project and
have found things I should have known to ask for but did not.
I also thank Mark Philp for suggesting that I write a book on Hume,
and Timothy Barton and Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for
encouraging the project. They cannot have expected it to take so long. For
extensive critical readings, I thank Andrea Belag, Charles Griswold, Michael
Kates, Mark Philp, Paul-Aarons Ngomo, and three anonymous referees for
Oxford. And I thank Kate Williams and Nadiah Al-Ammar for editorial work.
Finally, I thank Pat Suppes for the seminars we taught together at Stanford,
including one on Hume and John Rawls, and for many lively and extensive
lunch conversations. It is especially pleasing to dedicate this book to him as the
most nearly Humean person I know.
Although I have borrowed snippets of argument from prior published papers,
sometimes no doubt unconsciously, I have not used much of any of them
directly except for about half of one in scattered places in the book: ‘Rational
Choice Political Philosophy,’ in Irwin L. Morris, Joe Oppenheimer, and Karol
Soltan, editors, Politics from Anarchy to Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University
 acknowledgements xi

Press, 2007). I thank the editors and the publisher for permission to use
that material here. Chapter 5 was originally presented at the Branco Weiss
Laboratory for New Ideas in Economics and the Social Sciences, Central
European University, Budapest, Hungary, 22 May 2003. Earlier variants of
chapters 1, 3, 5, and 6 were presented as the Wittgenstein Lectures for 2003,
at the University of Bayreuth, 16–20 June 2003.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

1. Hume’s Place in History 1

2. Moral Psychology 27
3. Strategic Analysis 55
4. Convention 81
5. Political Theory 105
6. Justice As Order 134
7. Utilitarianism 155
8. Value Theory 173
9. Retrospective 198

Bibliography 232
Index 243
Detailed Contents

1. Hume’s place in history 1

Naturalism 6
Is and Ought 8
Rationalist Ethics 15
Intuitionist Ethics 16
Virtue Theory 20
Concluding Remarks 23

2. Moral Psychology 27
Utility Pleases 30
Morality Psychologized 32
The Limited Role of Reason 33
Sympathy and Moral Sentiments 36
Mirroring 41
Natural and Artificial Virtues 45
Unintended Consequences 48
Concluding Remarks 51

3. Strategic Analysis 55
Strategic Categories 58
Benevolence 62
Distributive Justice 66
Promise-Keeping 71
Collective Action 76
Coordination 78
Concluding Remarks 79

4. Convention 81
Iterated Coordination 83
The Force of Convention 86
Conventions and Functional Explanation 91
Allegiance to Government 95
Unequal Coordination 100
Concluding Remarks 102

5. Political Theory 105

Power 108
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to Spain in galleons. There must be a lot of this gold—
isn’t there, Mr. Coleson?”

“Yes—a lot!” he answered.

All resentment vanished from the hearts of these

strangely united enemies under the impulse of a
common gold madness. Mr. Coleson dived under, several
times, bringing up bars similar to those already found.
Then it was decided that they had better take what they
had, go to the Libertad, and wait till daylight for full
boatloads.

“People have been lost in these islands—among the

twisting, blind channels,” observed Mr. Coleson. “We laid
down markers on the islands as we came in, each time,
and we had better row out before it gets too dark to see
them.”

So they all returned to El Libertad and spent an excited 189

evening, hardly daring to sleep for fear they would wake
up to discover that their treasure was only dream-gold.
But it was solid, in the morning light, gleaming with its
yellow luster when they scraped the surface. They had
found a treasure for which men might easily struggle
and battle, kill and be killed.

The next few days were full of hard work; nevertheless,

it was work that brought no complaints.

The recovery of the golden bars was necessarily

somewhat slow because only one man could work in the
pit at a time. Mr. Coleson, Jim and Senor Ortiga took
turns, but most of the diving fell to Mr. Coleson, for as
they brought up more bars the level of the bottom fell
lower by their removal, and the shorter people were
totally under water when they tried to secure the bars,
and had to dive, grab a bar, thrust themselves upward
and be caught by those who waited.

But, one late afternoon they had exhausted the

contents of the hole as far as gold was concerned.
There were several large objects, presumably golden
placques or perhaps they were silver; but they were too
heavy to be dislodged, much less to be lifted to the
surface.

All of the company agreed that it was hardly worth 190

while to try for them any longer, and the white men,
with Jim, began to pick their way over to the two boats,
both filled with their last load of wealth. But Nicky
motioned to his chums to delay for a moment.

“Mr. Coleson had a despatch box of some kind almost at

the surface, just a little while ago,” he told them. “Let’s
make a try to get it again. He dropped it because he
said it probably contained only papers.”

“What do we want with papers?” argued Tom. “We can

come back some time and get it.”

“It may have the log of the old ship in it, or papers
about the cruise,” Nicky argued. “Cliff’s father would like
them more, I think, than the gold. He could write a
whole history about the Spanish times in America from
them, maybe.”

Cliff, being the oldest and strongest, decided to do the

diving. Divesting himself of clothing which he hung on
the remaining bushes on the rim of the islet they had
not disturbed, he plunged.

On his first rise he clutched an ancient ornament,

something like part of a figure of a god, but it was of
some stone, not of gold; he was about to throw it aside
but Nicky took it. “It might be a relic, like those we
found in the Carib diggings,” he suggested.

Cliff made several tries, and finally brought up an old, 191

and very much rusted bronze box, of very curious
workmanship, with a handle at each end. It was badly
eaten away by oxide and Cliff urged Tom, who took it,
to handle it with care. Then Cliff was helped up onto the
water-covered bedrock and reached for his clothes.

“Why—” Nicky, turning toward the boats, gasped. “What

are they doing?”

“They’re putting gold from our boat into theirs!”

As Tom made the exclamation he started toward the

distant boats; the two white men and the colored Jim
were loading up their boat.

“What are you doing that for?” cried Tom.

He, as well as his slightly injured foot would allow,

hastened over the coral. Cliff, his clothes carried in a
rough, quickly snatched bundle, ran too. Nicky
scrambled ahead of him.

But before they could get to the boats they saw Jim
take the oars out of their boat, climb into his own, and
thrust it rapidly backward—there was no depth to turn it
around—down the channel.

“We’ll leave these oars on the island at the bend,” called 192
Senor Ortiga. “We don’t want to leave you here to
starve. Swim down or push your boat ahead of you and
swim till you get the oars; then follow the markers; we’ll
leave them, too. We don’t want to desert you, but we
must. By the time you get out we can be safely away!”

Nicky and Cliff fought their way over the coral as fast as
they could, stumbling into crevasses, almost falling as
their incautious feet struck rises; but they saw that it
was wasted effort.

They returned, to assist Tom.

Once the three were in their boat, far down the channel
they saw the other boat turn and disappear around a
bend.

“It will be dark, before we get there,” cried Tom, and he

began to shudder and to forecast dire difficulties, but
Cliff bade him, rather sharply, to stop.

“Remember what the teacher said, last term, about

being afraid?” Nicky reminded Tom. “He said that when
we became afraid we deadened our common sense and
made pictures of dangers that wouldn’t exist at all
unless we thought they did. He said it wasn’t what was
dangerous that hurts us, but what we thought might
happen. So—Tom—snap out of it!” He spoke rather
curtly and slangily, to impress Tom the more quickly.
Tom saw the sense in the rebuke and reminder and
grinned sheepishly.

Meanwhile, a hand on the stern thwart, Cliff was 193

thrusting with his feet, swimming, and pushing the boat
ahead at a slow rate.

They finally reached the distant island and found the

oars.

“Had we better stay here till daylight?” questioned Cliff.

“No,” Nicky declared. “They have our gold, and they
mustn’t get away. They have a heavy load and they may
get stuck in the channel for their greediness. We can
see the papers they stuck on sticks to mark the channel.
Let’s get on as far as we can.”

Tom agreed with him, not especially caring to stay amid

the spooky, silent islets all night.

They had hard work in the swiftly closing darkness, but

by using their eyes sharply and by going ahead slowly,
as their escaping enemies must also do, they finally saw
clear water ahead.

“Hooray!” cried Nicky. “I think I see them still in the

rowboat! Pull hard, Cliff and Tom, we can get there
before they get away!”

But as he said it there came a hail, sharp and eager

from the shore of the island at the mouth of the
channel.

“Help! Help!”

Tom and Cliff held their oars, surprised, listening.

“Boat ahoy! Help!” 194

“Somebody’s on that island!” Nicky declared.

Mechanically responding to a call for aid, Tom and Cliff
swung the tender’s nose toward the island. Their way
took them very close.

“Boys—Master Cliff—Master Tom—Master Nicky! It’s

Sam!”
The figure they could discern against the trees waved
its arms.

“Quick, pull in close,” cried the tall figure, wading into

the water to meet them. “My boat’s gone. Take me in.
We can git to the other boat before they get away!
Hurry, please, sars!”

It was only an instant before he had caught the

approaching gunwale and was tumbling in. “Now,” he
cried, “give way, sars!”

“Sam!” cried Nicky, at the bow, pumping the black hand.

“I never was so glad to see anybody in my life. Grab
those oars! We’ll get them yet!”

But they were fated to act otherwise.

195
 CHAPTER XXIII
MAROONED

After a quick handclasp with the other two, Sam

counseled delay. “Better to tell me what has happened
to you,” he said. “There are men hiding on that ship,
waiting till the men in the boat get all their dunnage on
board——”

“Dunnage!” interrupted Nicky. “Sam—it’s gold!”

Sam’s eyes rolled with excitement.

“They went and found it!” he gasped.

“We did, and they took it away from us,” Tom explained.

“Who’s hiding?” Cliff asked.

Sam suggested that they had better tell him their story
first, and he laid on the oars and listened as they gave
him a brief history of their adventures.

In his turn he told them his story.

“When I got my head full of crazy scares,” he said, “I

left you on Crocodile Key, and sailed for the open water.
Later on a revenue cutter overhauled me. Mr. Neale was
with the men.”

“Then he was all right?” Nicky asked.

“Yes,” Sam replied, “all right, and mad. When he found 196
out what I’d went and done he gave me an awful
talking to, and then they turned the cutter about and
went back to look for you.”

After that, Sam explained, his conscience bothered him,

but he decided that the boys must be all right, and so
held on his course toward Jamaica. But during the late
afternoon clouds gathered, wind came up, rain squalls
blew over and his work was cut out for him.

“I judged it was a ‘judgment’ on me from On High,” Sam

declared. “I had more’n I could do, handling the sails to
get them down, and all I could do I couldn’t get them
reefed quick enough——”

“And you lost your boat?” broke in Nicky.

“No, sar,” Sam replied. “Wait—let me tell you. I had to

run before the wind and when daylight came and the
wind dropped I was so wore out with a sight at the tiller
that I just fell down and slept. I let the Treasure Belle
drift.”

When he had awakened, he went on, he did not know 197

where he was, but from the direction in which the wind
had blown, he guessed that he must be well into the
Gulf of Mexico. He trimmed his sails and with the old,
heavy-duty engine for a kicker, he set a course
Eastward. It brought him, in time, within sight of what
he discovered to be the lower end of the Ten Thousand
Island archipelago, almost opposite to the wrecked
Senorita.

“I saw somebody making a signal with a flag, and the

flag at the masthead was upside down—a sign of
distress,” Sam pursued his story, “I ran close in and
found out that the Senorita was a wreck.”

“We were on it when it happened—but we told you. Go

on,” said Tom. Sam finished quickly.

“There was a colored cook, a Spaniard, a man named

Tew, and some sailors and the engineer,” Sam
concluded. “They offered me money to take them
aboard the Treasure Belle. I did, but instead of going
back around Cape Sable, they took me and tied me up
and threw me in the little cabin. They talked about
capturing a boat or something and the first thing I
knew, they had passed the Libertad, here, and went on
beyond during the night. That was at night—last night.
They hauled the Treasure Belle out of sight between
two islands, a little North of here. There they laid quiet
all today. One man swam off from my sloop and came
back and they all talked. Towards evening they started
the engine, came down, hauled alongside and got on
board the Libertad. They had untied me and told me to
swim onto one of the islands and stay—or starve, for all
they cared. Then they held guns on me until I swam to
the Key. They said if I warned anybody I saw, they’d
pepper me full of lead. So I hid, and when I saw two
white men and a Negro rowing towards Libertad, I
didn’t dare to say anything. But nothing happened to
them, and when I saw your boat I guessed it was safe
to hail, because the men on the Libertad must be hiding
and couldn’t hurt me. And so I found you.”

“And I’m glad of it,” said Tom. 198

“I’m right sorry sars, for what I done, and I’ll try to
make it up to you,” Sam said.
“It’s all right,” Nicky stated. “We won’t hold it against
you. But you didn’t say what happened to your sloop.”

“They put two sailors into her and sailed her away down
the coast,” Sam replied. “To tell somebody something
about bringing up some cases or something like that. I
couldn’t hear much. They talked about lots of things—
Indians and sharks and—oh, lots!”

“But why don’t we row to the Libertad?” demanded

Nicky.

As he spoke the reason became apparent. Jim, in the 199

boat, handed up onto the deck to the white men the
last bars of gold.

“Come aboard,” was presumably his order; the chums

and Sam were too far away to hear. They did see
sudden flashes, hear a subdued commotion, hear
splashes in the water. Guns were being fired, and
people were shouting.

Almost immediately, before the shots died down, in fact,

they heard the roar of El Libertad’s motor, saw her
swing to her anchor, and, as it lifted from the coral,
turned in a wide sweep, while shots flashed their spurts
of flame through the darkness from her stern.

Then she swung onto a Northerly course and

disappeared swiftly beyond an island at the Northern
side of the channel.

“They’ve shot those men who took our gold,” Nicky

declared. “Sam, and Cliff, row there, quick! We ought to
try to pick them up—maybe they’re badly hurt.” Sam
and Tom dipped their oars with a will.
Cliff having donned his clothes, of course, before he
took the oars as they rowed out from the treasure islet,
took the tender’s light tiller from the floor where it lay
while they navigated the shoal water, shipped it and its
attached rudder, and steered so that the rowers could
put more force into their strokes and thus cover the
water more quickly.

They soon reached the spot, and saw several figures 200
struggling with a third.

Sam and Nicky hailed. An answer came, “Jim, here, was

knocked overside when he tried to scramble onto our
ship. Help us get him to shore. His head hit the coral,
we think! They sank the rowboat.”

They pulled close and with some difficulty the inert

colored man was lifted over the gunwale and dropped
into the tender’s bottom. Then Mr. Coleson, with a
smarting flesh wound in his arm, and Ortiga, who was
too busy expressing an unfavorable opinion of his
renegade brother to examine his hurts, seemed to have
escaped with a scratched hand.

They began to row toward the island but Nicky made a

suggestion.

“Let’s pull for the wrecked Senorita,” he urged. “There’s

most likely to be a medicine kit on board her, and food
as well.”

It took quite a while to get back down the shore line to

the point almost opposite the Shark River where the
Senorita had grounded; but when they got there Nicky’s
prophecy proved to be correct and Senor Ortiga, when
the surgical and medicinal appliances were brought,
made an examination of Jim, and then dressed a rather
bad scalp wound, bringing its edges together with
surgical thread after washing it with antiseptics.

Jim came to himself before the bandaging was 201

completed. Though weak and a little bit uncertain in
speech, he was in no way permanently injured in his
brain. Rest would restore his usual vigor and help
nature to heal his hurt.

Weary and discouraged, because there was nothing to

be done toward the recovery of their lost treasure, the
chums, after a midnight meal, threw themselves onto
bunks in the engine room, preferring these to more
comfortable wall berths with the two white men who
had done them so mean a turn.

Sam elected to stay with his own companions, and Jim

was put in the forecastle to be alone while he rested.

“I certainly am grateful to you for saving us, just now,”

said Mr. Coleson as they separated for the night.

“After the way he acted, he ought to be,” Nicky confided

to his comrades, when they were alone.

They slept peacefully, thoroughly wearied by hard work

and worn down by the nerve tension of the last few
days.

It was Sam who shook them awake.

“That man, Coleson, wasn’t so grateful, after all,” he 202

said when the chums had rubbed some sleep out of
their eyes in the early dawn. “The tender is gone. The
two white men—gone too!”
“The ungrateful—” began Nicky. But what would calling
names do for them? Certainly it wouldn’t help any.

“We are not on an island, and we’ve got food,” Nicky

observed, recovering his usual trust in the eventual
justice of life. “But we are marooned! And yet—and yet,
I’ll say it again—we’ll come out best in the long run. You
wait and see!”

203
 CHAPTER XXIV
“A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK”

To say that Clarence Neale, the leader at the start of the

Mystery Boys’ adventure, was worried would be a tame
statement of the truth. Clarence Neale was more than
that. He felt that without intending to do so he had
shirked a responsibility.

Mr. Gray, the scholar and writer, had entrusted Cliff to

his care on an adventure that promised to be merely a
cruise; Nicky Lane, and Tom, had come under his
protection without permission from their relatives; and
not one of them was with him, nor was their
whereabouts known to him.

No wonder the young archaeologist, himself not too far

from boyhood to recall what dangers its headstrong
impulses lead to, dreaded many dire things.

Two things he knew definitely. The boys were not on 204

Crocodile Key, nor did any boatman or native in Little
Card Sound or on its shores know a thing about them.
The second point he was sure about was that they were
not on Sam’s sloop. He had overhauled that in the
government cutter and made sure.

Where were they?

A lieutenant in charge of the patrol had set him ashore
where a government sub-station of the patrol service
enabled him to use the telephone, to communicate with
other stations. Not a sign of the boys resulted from his
several calls.

“No word?” asked the young lieutenant later in the

afternoon.

Mr. Neale shook his head dejectedly, climbing aboard

the cutter.

“I can’t see anything to explain it except that the lads

must have gone inland, and become lost,” he asserted.
Lieutenant Sommerlee discounted such a suggestion.
The outcrop of coral on which they landed while he
went to interview Nelse and Pompey, was cut off by
water too deep to wade; they would hardly dare swim
to the further shore; it was swampy as could be seen
from Crocodile Key if they took pains to look, he
declared.

“I suggest that you come aboard again,” Lieutenant 205

Sommerlee invited, holding to his own idea, without
stating it, that the boys had been taken off the key by
some fisherman. “I have word that a band of hi-jackers
is somewhere around and I have to watch for them; we
can easily hail the different natives as we pass up and
down the coast and see which one rescued the boys.”

Clarence Neale accepted the invitation and was on

board the cutter when, that night, she pursued, and lost
touch with, the Senorita.

It was Lieutenant Sommerlee’s notion that the Senorita,

if it was she, had turned tail and run for her home port
in Cuba. He was ready to give up the search for her, and
the more so because of a growing intensity of interest in
the boys.

Naturally, not knowing they were on the Senorita, or

that she had gone into the archipelago, neither Mr.
Neale nor the lieutenant thought of such a thing as
looking for the adventuresome trio in those waters. It
seemed almost certain that they must have hailed some
small boat, and on being taken aboard, had found no
means of communicating their plight, or of getting back.

But as day followed day, the idea had to be given up. 206
There was no spot that the cutter had not touched,
where the boys could possibly be. Unless they had been
taken off on a coasting sloop—but none had been seen
in Little Card Sound, nor would it have excuse for being
there. Of course the few who knew the truth about the
Senorita and her hiding place on the day that the boys
had been missed, kept their mouths tightly closed.

“I cannot imagine what has become of them,” Mr. Neale

said, with anxiety in his voice and deep wrinkles of
worry on his forehead.

“Oh, they’ll turn up, as boys do, and usually safe and
sound,” the lieutenant said.

One of their men sighted a sail and gave her position.

Lieutenant Sommerlee gave orders; the helm was
shifted and a course was laid to intercept the vessel, not
because the boys might be on it, but to hail it and see if
any news had been picked up somewhere.

As they came within better sighting distance, Lieutenant

Sommerlee handed Mr. Neale his binoculars.
“Didn’t you say Sam’s sloop we overhauled was going
back to Jamaica?” he asked. Clarence Neale nodded. “I
told Sam he was discharged, as far as our party was
concerned,” he acknowledged.

“Look!” ordered the lieutenant. Mr. Neale lifted and

focused the glasses.

“Great—guns!” he cried. “That’s the Treasure Belle, now,

as sure as I live!”

They lost no time in laying alongside and hailing.

But Sam did not answer. Instead one of two men spoke
through the deepening twilight.

“Sam—why he’s sick in the cabin. We’re taking him to a 207

doctor!”

“Sam—sick,” Mr. Neale said to the cutter’s officer, “but

we left him on the way to Jamaica the afternoon before
the squall. How did these men get on his boat?—and
——”

“And why are they bound Eastward along the coast

when he ought to be nearly to Jamaica by now—here,
heave to!”

The sail came down with a run—the men were careless

sloopmen or very ignorant of a single-masted boat and
her handling. The cutter swung in a circle and ranged
up beside the sloop.

It was practically dark, for the twilight is short in the

season, and the men sat with their heads well covered.
But if this was a ruse to escape detection of their
identity it failed. Lieutenant Sommerlee motioned to a
patrol member, and the man caught the rail of the
Treasure Belle and clung so that the boats lay sides-to.
The lieutenant stepped across the rails, and made his 208
way to the cabin. At the same instant the two men
stood up, but before they could carry out their intention
—which might have been to plunge over the side and
take chances of swimming away and escaping in the
dark—the young officer had his pistol trained, drawing it
as he whirled.

“Throw up your hands!” he snapped, “and sit down

again!”

“Sam,” called Mr. Neale, clambering into the cockpit of

his old sloop, “where are you?”

“Ain’t no one there,” said one of the men. “Lieutenant,

will you promise us a fair break if we tell you the truth?”

“Yellow-livered, of course,” he said. “I guessed you

would try that.” He went close, called for a flashlight
and trained it on the two anxious sailors. “Ho! You
—‘Runty’—you, too—‘Jack O’ the Keys.’ What are you
doing in this sloop? Where is Sam—but I may as well
tell you that you are under arrest right now, and if you
expect any leniency, which I won’t promise at this
moment, you had better say what’s on your minds.”

Then they told him. He, and Clarence Neale, learned of

the escape of the Senorita, as well as of Nelse’s part in
that, and in the hi-jacker’s plans, in which Nelse figured
as a receiver for their stolen cargoes, since he owned
Crocodile Key; they also learned of the wreck, of the
boys’ ruse, and escape, and of the latest escapade, as
far as the men knew it.

Full speed for the archipelago, was the present order, 209
after the two sailors had been handcuffed and two of
the cutter’s crew took over the Treasure Belle, to sail
her to the patrol base until Sam could claim her.

“It looks as though there’s a fire up yonder,” said

Lieutenant Sommerlee, as the cutter doubled the
Westermost nose of Florida, “See the light in the sky?”

“I hope the boys aren’t in any danger!” cried Clarence

Neale.

None of the crew, neither Mr. Neale, the lieutenant, nor

Uncle Sam’s sailors, could resist a cheer of delight when
they got close enough to see that the fire was merely a
great heap of wood, on a small islet near the channel to
Shark River.

They sent up a rocket at the first verification of this fact,

and urged their speedy engine to its fullest power as
rockets began to burst in the sky, blue, green and red
flares showed and a dull boom from a signaling cannon
floated across the water to them.

It seemed an age, but was not so very long, before the

chums were leaping, skylarking, dancing, standing on
their heads, slapping one another on the back, adding a
slap or so for delighted Sam.

They had collected wood, cut parts from the wrecked 210
vessel, made a signal fire on the islet, and kept it
burning all day, and into the night, since the discovery
that they were marooned, that morning. The purpose
was to create a smoke smudge during the day, and a
light at night, with the certainty that some coasting
vessel or other ship must see it and come closer to
investigate.
The rockets and colored flares were the signal stores of
the Senorita, used more as fireworks for the celebration
than with any other purpose, for the signal rocket of the
cutter had been read by Sam as the patrol’s own signal.

“Thank Heaven you boys are safe!” cried Mr. Neale for
the tenth time, pumping Nicky’s hand again and again,
sharing fist-cuffs impartially between the shoulderblades
of Cliff and Tom in his elation.

“And thank Lieutenant Sommerlee too,” said Cliff. They

did.

“But now,” said Nicky, soberly, “what to do about the

gold!”

They had, of course, told all their adventures.

“Now that you are all right,” Lieutenant Sommerlee said,

“I feel that we shall have to let the gold wait. What I am
interested in is not gold but—hi-jackers!”

“And pirates,” added Cliff. “Don’t forget they are in a

stolen boat—the Libertad belongs to one Ortiga, and the
other one has it.”

“But, Lieutenant,” protested Nicky, “if you get the hi- 211
jackers we’ll get the gold. They have it!”

“That is true,” agreed the officer. “At the moment I am

puzzled about the course through which we can secure
either men or gold.”

Nicky jumped up eagerly.

“When the Senorita was running away,” he reminded his

chums, “remember that Tew told us they would hide up
in Shark River?”
“I do,” agreed Cliff.

“And Sam, when they took his sloop, thought the men
said something to the two on her about bringing liquor
cases or cases of liquor, and something was said about
sharks——”

“That’s so!” Sam exclaimed.

“I believe they’ve gone into Shark River—” Nicky

declared.

“But we are at the mouth of the channel into Shark

River,” objected Tom. “And they captured the Libertad
North of this place, and turned North again from there.”

“They may have doubled back; Nicky defended his idea.

“I think there is a more likely solution,” suggested the 212

lieutenant. “They went to the channel at the opening of
the Harney River, above; there they could go back into
the inner channel—above Whitewater Bay, and down
that, again, to the landward entry into the Shark.”

Plans were discussed, ideas proposed, until far into the

night. In all that the chums proposed, they figured; in
those their elders discussed, they did not.

But because of the crew’s depletion by the departure on

the sloop of two of her fighting patrols, and because
neither Sam nor Mr. Neale was an expert with a rifle or
pistol, the more vigorous plans for pursuit and capture
had to be shelved in favor of more adroit measures.

And so it came about that a plan partially suggested by

Nicky and elaborated by the lieutenant, in which the
boys must figure, was the one to be adopted.
And again the Mystery Boys were adventure bound.

“But,” said Cliff, as a new thought struck him, “those hi-

jackers must have seen our lights—we made plenty of
excitement.”

“Yes,” agreed Tom. “They may have seen them—then,

they will either turn and run across the Gulf, or
somewhere else, or they will unload the treasure in
Shark River and hide it in the Everglades.”

“Once it’s hidden there, any effort to find it would be 213

like looking for a needle in a hay-stack!” declared Mr.
Neale.

“Then let’s hurry!” cried Nicky, and from that instant all
was activity on the stranded Senorita.

214
 CHAPTER XXV
IN THE EVERGLADES

In order to see how Nicky’s plan was, the picture that

he had in his mind must be understood. This was
Nicky’s mind picture:

The hi-jackers, after capturing Sam’s sloop, had sent

her, with two men aboard, to make contact with their
Little Card Sound headquarters. Nelse was there and
from what he had heard and pieced together, Nicky
supposed that the two men on the Treasure Belle would
find Nelse, and have him go, or send Seminole Indians,
across the inland waterways, to take to the hi-jackers
some liquor cases in which to conceal the treasure bars.

When they captured the Libertad, the hi-jackers had left

three men floundering in the water; for all they knew or
cared, these men might have been wounded. The
Libertad’s own boat had been sunk by bullet holes
during the fight, which was why the boys had been left
without a boat when Senor Ortiga and Mr. Coleson had
fled the Senorita in the tender.

Under such conditions the hi-jackers had started North 215

in El Libertad, the night previous to that on which the
cutter arrived.

They would hardly go to the shores of the Southern

States bordering the Gulf of Mexico, Nicky decided,
because they would be afraid of having the gold
discovered: it was in bars and had been loaded into the
Libertad without any provision for its concealment and
transportation later on.

The hi-jackers would probably go, Nicky argued, into

the inner channel of the archipelago and then lay up in
the Shark River, that small stream having its source at
the edge of the Everglades. It was the most Southerly
place they could get close to the Everglades, and the
Seminoles, bringing the cases to put the treasure in
would come up the inland way through part of Big
Cypress Swamp, along the rim of the Everglades, and
meet them. That was the only way Nicky could see for
the hi-jackers to do, because they had no small boat
and could not go any closer to the shallow water of the
Florida swamp than the draught of El Libertad would
permit.

They could not have had enough gasoline in the tanks 216
to risk a very long voyage; that was the reason he did
not think they would try to get to the Southern States
and risk themselves in strange waters with no way to
carry the gold from the vessel to their Northern
headquarters, wherever that might be.

With all of this the older heads of the party agreed.

Their first plan, then, was to get the Libertad pocketed

and surrounded; this they must do before the treasure
could be hidden.

Without a small boat it was not probable that the hi-

jackers could get into the Everglades, but they might
know the Seminoles and might be able to get hold of a
canoe.
A day, and a good part of the night before had passed
since they went away in the Libertad, but Lieutenant
Sommerlee and Mr. Neale decided that they had
probably gone into the Shark River and laid up. They
had no reason to be afraid: they left the Libertad’s
owners in the water; they left three boys and a Negro in
another rowboat. There was not much danger, from
their way of looking at it, in anything that these people
could do.

If they had seen the signal smoke of the day or the fire 217
and the rockets and lights at night, it would be too late
for them to run out in the Libertad; and, unless they
had already hidden the treasure, they could not very
easily do so in the darkness. They would be more apt to
believe themselves well hidden, and would not make
any move before daylight, because they would be
waiting for their two men in the sloop to get Southeast
and bring help from inland. They did not know, of
course, that the men had been captured.

First of all, Sam and a patrol sailor went over the side of
the Senorita, in the dark, with ropes under their arms
and fastened to the rail. They searched about on the
reef at the side of the ship where Nicky and his chums
had thrown the rifles and pistols. Lieutenant Sommerlee
did not think that these had been in the water long
enough to be severely damaged or made useless; he
wanted them for a purpose.

Sam and his companion by dint of much searching

brought up both submerged rifles and several pistols.

They were set to work cleaning and drying and oiling

them at once.
“Cliff,” ordered Lieutenant Sommerlee, taking command,
“you—with Sam and Jim and one of my sailors, will stay
on the Senorita. Jim has had a night and a day to rest in
and he is pretty strong again. You four are the
guardians of this Shark River channel.”

“If they try to run out past us we must try to prevent

that,” Cliff agreed.

“Yes,” nodded the commander. “My boatswain, Jack, will 218

be with you and, for the sake of discipline, you must all
obey his orders. He has a cool head and is a fine shot.
Four of you ought to be able to block this channel if the
hi-jackers try to run out here.”

“We will!” agreed Cliff, feeling the importance of his

share in the blockade.

“The rest of us will start at once in the cutter,” the

lieutenant continued. “We will tow our own light dory,
and when we reach the inner mouth of the Harney
River, Mr. Neale, Nicky, and one of my men who has
been into the Everglades, will drop off in the dory and
go up the Harney River as fast as they can by night. By
submerging a flashlight in the water, training its beam
on the bottom, and rowing carefully they can get almost
to the head of the stream, where it has its source at the
rim of the Everglades. From there, as soon as dawn
comes, my man will direct the course South along the
rim of the Everglades to the nearest point he sees fit to
the Shark River. The Harney starts a few miles North of
the Shark, at the rimrock, and by sending the boat
there, we can block the Everglades side and stop any
Indians who may come there from Big Cypress.”

“And we will stop them, never fear!” declared Nicky

stoutly.
“I know that you will,” said the lieutenant with a smile. 219
“The cutter will proceed carefully down the inner
channel. I will be in command, and will lie-to close to
the bank, not far from the Shark. Unless the hi-jackers
rush out I will do nothing until we are all in position. We
shall need some signals.”

“Have you any smoke-rockets on the cutter?” asked

Nicky. “They would make enough light to be seen at
night, and smoke to see by day.”

“We have,” answered a sailor. “Plenty of them.”

“Then we will take four,” Nicky suggested. “How will we

use them?”

“One at night will call for help. One right after the other
at night will call urgently for help. Do not use them for
any other purpose tonight, and I will be watching the
sky over the ’Glades.”

“All right, sir,” said Nicky in proper nautical deference.

“Then, when we get into place at the inside end of the
Shark, shall we signal?”

“No,” replied the lieutenant. “But if you see that there is

no boat in the Shark River at all, send up a rocket, wait
a minute and then send up a second. Watch for the
same signal in reply; if you do not get it, repeat with
your other two rockets. If the boat is there, make no
signal unless the men are escaping. In that case, send
up three rockets in quick succession, as fast as you
can.”

“How shall we be able to set them up?” asked Mr. 220

Neale.
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