"On my honour I will," he answered, "even to telling you where I
believe your wealth is hidden."
She made a gesture as though deprecating the word "your," and then,
seeing he was waiting eagerly for her to continue, she did so.
"He disappeared finally in 1687--Barbara never heard of him again.
Then as time went on she grew very poor. There had been a son born to
them whom she had brought up to be a sailor, too, hoping thereby that,
when he also became a roamer, he might somehow gather news of his
father; and by turning the house into an inn, she managed to exist. In
that way years passed and she began to grow old, while her son still
followed the sea, though never rising to be anything more than a
humble seaman. But more years after, when she was getting to be quite
an old woman, her house was blown down in a hurricane--though it had
survived the terrible one of 1722, when all the wharves at Port Royal
were destroyed--and then--she found something."
"What?" asked Reginald. "What was it?" He remembered what David Crafer
had found under circumstances not dissimilar, and, perhaps, because he
was a sailor--and thereby given even in these modern days to belief in
strange and mysterious things--he wondered if the hand of Fate had
pointed out to that old Barbara some marvellous clue to where the
treasure was. Yet he knew that it could scarce have told her of the
removal of the chests of treasure from the island to the Key.
"She found," went on the Barbara of to-day, "a little walled-up wooden
cupboard----"
"Great Heaven!" he muttered beneath his breath, so that, this time,
she did not hear him.
"Close to the place where he used to sit and drink when at home, but
of the existence of which she was ignorant. Yet, she remembered, he
had often told her that there were secret hiding-places in the house,
and that, if he died suddenly or never came back, she was to search
diligently and she would find them. Especially he bade her search in
that room; but, what with waiting and watching for his return, she had
forgotten his instructions. And now that it was burst open, the wall
that secured it being only a plank of wood which fell out at the first
violence of the hurricane, she found this cupboard full of various
pieces of money, gold and silver, and a paper in his writing telling
her of his treasure in this island."
"Then it was his!" exclaimed Reginald.
"By discovery. He wrote that he had put into Coffin Island--as it was
called even so long ago as his time--in a storm, and that, while
roaming about the place, he and his comrades had come upon a hut, old
and long since built, but quite deserted now. Then he went on to
write--my father has the paper now, and I have often seen it--that the
sloop he had was sent to Tortola to fetch provisions----"
"Was it in charge of a man named Martin, by any chance?" asked
Reginald.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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