The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

In 1821, when General San Martin was liberating Peru, the wealthy Spanish families of Lima had fled to sea with their gold and jewels, estimated to be worth several millions. Some of the Spanish vessels were intercepted by Benito de Soto, a merciless pirate leader, and his crew of ex-slavers. The Spanish were deprived of their lives and their wealth. It is thought that de Soto, hard pressed, secreted his loot on bleak Trinidad before his final capture and execution in Gibraltar. His colleagues in crime were also brought to justice and the rope that is, all except one. The lone fugitive escaped to serve on a British merchantman. When he died in Bombay, his trunk disclosed his former occupation as well as a canvas map of Trinidad. The merchantman Captain did not take the map seriously until years later when, in retirement at Newcastle, he realized that it might hold the secret to Lima’s missing treasure. The map indicated that de Soto had hidden his gold and jewels in a cave near the top of a ravine on Trinidad. In 1880 the Captain’s son visited the island, located the treasure site, but found that landslides had covered the cave under tons of earth. Lacking equipment, the heir could do little. He retired from the hunt. But the fascinating map survived to inspire four more treasure expeditions to Trinidad before Baron James Harden-Hickey himself waded ashore.
    In his lonely hike across the island, Harden-Hickey found no signs of human life except for some stone huts left by the Brazilian Portuguese who had discovered Trinidad around 1700, and debris of earlier treasure-hunting expeditions. Though the island was desolate and wind-swept, and though there was no evidence of the treasure site, Harden-Hickey was, nevertheless, strangely stimulated. “I explored the island thoroughly,” he told a New York reporter five years later, when the passage of time had cast a romantic aura over the visit. “It is about twenty-three miles long and two or three miles wide. It is on a rock foundation, but has a plateau on which there is abundant vegetation. A river of pure, fresh water runs through it. It has all the essential qualifications for supporting several hundred people. Great quantities of wild fowl make it their breeding place, and it is visited periodically by thousands of turtles, which deposit their eggs there.”
    Before the storm abated and the Astoria was able to continue on its way, Harden-Hickey apparently revisited the island, solemnly claimed it in his own name, and “planted a flag of his own design.” As he did nothing more about the island at once, this seemed to be merely a momentary romantic gesture. He spent the entire following year in India, listening to holy men and learning Sanskrit, after which he went for brief visits to China and Japan. At last, in 1890, he returned to Republican France, where his earlier offenses seem to have been forgotten.
    In Paris, which was just then becoming a shopping center for American heiresses who did their sightseeing from the Almanach de Gotha instead of Baedeker , Baron Harden-Hickey met Anna H. Flagler, daughter of John Haldane Flagler, a man whom newspapers referred to as “the Standard Oil magnate,” but who had actually made his fortune in the manufacture of iron (some of which was used to construct the $275,000 ironclad Monitor in 1861). In 1891, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, Harden-Hickey and Miss Flagler were married by the Reverend John Hall.
    During the next, few years, while residing in the Flagler home in New York, Harden-Hickey unnerved his family by devoting his energies to several highly original projects, among them translating a book on Buddhism, completing his volume Bible Plagiarisms , perfecting a plan for missionary work to convert Americans to Buddha, and developing means of extracting money from his disapproving father-in-law.
    Flagler had powerfully opposed the marriage. He regarded Harden-Hickey as a foreign