H. B. Drake
The edition's author credit
Cursed Be the Treasure names H. B. Drake on the title page of its 1928 New York edition and includes a dedication to his son. Those details establish the edition’s presentation, without providing a verified full biography. The narrator begins by trying to separate childhood memories from an older mystery that preceded his birth. The three parts are organized around his father, Captain Field and Dirk Stormaway, suggesting that knowledge of the past reaches him through successive relationships.
Memory learning a different story
A child can experience danger without possessing the language to name it. The retrospective narrator lets adventure and fear occupy the same remembered event, then separates them as understanding grows. Drake's division into relationships reinforces that process: knowledge arrives through people rather than an impersonal explanation. The father's role as protector makes the discovery of hidden circumstances emotionally consequential as well as suspenseful.
Cursed be the treasure
For the child telling this story in retrospect, sudden departures and hiding places once seemed part of a wonderful game shared with his father. Pirate stories and imagined enemies supplied the language through which he understood their wandering life. A frightening encounter gradually gives substance to the pursuer his father calls Shadow-of-Fear, forcing a distinction between adventure as entertainment and danger as a daily condition. Drake builds the mystery through memories whose meaning changes as the narrator acquires knowledge. The treasure plot therefore begins with a more intimate uncertainty about the man who has been his protector, teacher, and only stable companion. Inns, caves, and unfamiliar allies extend a childhood world already shaped by secrets that began before its narrator was born. English text of the 1928 Macy-Masius edition.
Read an episode twice in your mind
Identify what the child believes is happening, then what the older voice allows you to suspect. Which details support both readings? Notice when a place of play becomes a place of concealment. The treasure plot gains force from these changes of interpretation. Keep the narrator's childhood separate from the author's life; a convincing remembered voice is a literary construction, not proof of autobiography.