Beneath all these, in a hollowed space, was a chest securely padlocked, which was duly hoisted out and burst open, and in it were discovered seventeen bags, each containing a hundred Spanish doubloons, three parchment books, and last, but far from least, a small golden casket of exquisite workmanship, filled quite full of precious stones in their natural, rough state, except a very few which were cut and polished. In all they would have filled a pint measure. These were Barbe Rouge’s _petites fées_--his little fairies. * * * * * Now what I have recounted so far is a kind of prologue to what follows. The purport of my story is to show how the skeleton came in the treasure vault, which was opened by our good friends, Nilford and Ducas, with whom, however, we have nothing further to do. I must point out that the following narrative is what I have gathered from the pages of one of the three books found in “Barbe Rouge’s” chest, two of them being logs of his voyages (and _such_ voyages), and the third a kind of private diary. I have pieced together the somewhat disconnected jottings of Red Beard into the following story, drawing _slightly_ on my imagination to fill in the gaps. * * * * * On the morning of April 28, 175--, the vessel owned and commanded by “Barbe Rouge,” called _La Chauve-souris_, was lying quietly at anchor in the little haven at the back of the lofty pinnacle of rocks known as La Creviçhon, for she was to sail on the morrow, or the second day at latest, for a cruise in the West Indies. She was a smart little schooner, mounting ten guns, and carried the large complement of thirty-eight men, for she was what the French Government were pleased to call a licensed privateer, although, if public report went for anything, she might with more propriety have been stigmatized as something with a much more ugly name. Whatever people might call her was no concern of Jean Tussaud (which was Barbe Rouge’s real name), _he_ called her a privateer, and so we also will call her, for the word _pirate_ is not at all a nice-sounding word. She had some weeks previously returned from a very prosperous cruise in the Mediterranean, and although she came home short-handed, to the extent of eight men, she brought with her, as some sort of human equivalent, two very fine women, both of whom were young and handsome.