In 1776 four wealth Tories were afraid that Washington was going to capture Manhattan Island and got all their valuables together and fled to a little island where Nick Carter and Patsy are heading now. The Tories buried everything somewhere on the island and recoded the burial place in a secret code or cipher. They lived there for a while and then were all lost in a storm on their way back to the mainland.

Now a lawyer named Andrew Jessop has come across something that convinces him that the story is true and has rounded up the heirs of the original Tories and has arranged for them to meet on the island along with Nick Carter who has been invited to decipher the code.