Stolen Treasure

"And did you sign?" asked Mr. Pettibones, all agog to hear the conclusion of so strange a narration.

"Woe is me, sir, that I should have done so!" quoth Captain Obadiah, rolling his eyes until little but the whites of them were to be seen.

"And did you catch the Spanish ship?"

"That we did, sir, and stripped her as clean as a whistle."

"'Tis all a prodigious lie!" cried Colonel Belford, in a fury. "Sir, can you sit so complacently and be made a fool of by so extravagant a fable?"

"Indeed it is unbelievable," said Mr. Pettibones.

At this faint reply, Captain Obadiah burst out laughing; then renewing his narrative – "Indeed, sir," he declared, "you may believe me or not, as you please. Nevertheless, I may tell you that, having so obtained my prize, and having time to think coolly over the bargain I had made, I says to myself, says I: 'Obediah Belford! Obadiah Belford, here is a pretty pickle you are in. 'Tis time you quit these parts and lived decent, or else you are damned to all eternity.' And so I came hither to New Hope, reverend sir, hoping to end my days in quiet. Alas, sir! would you believe it? scarce had I finished my fine new house up at the Point when hither comes that evil being to whom I had sold my sorrowful soul. 'Obadiah,' says he, 'Obadiah Belford, I have a mind to live in New Hope also,' 'Where?' says I. 'Well,' says he, 'you may patch up the old meetinghouse; 'twill serve my turn for a while.' 'Well,' thinks I to myself, 'there can be no harm in that,' And so I did as he bade me – and would not you do as much for one who had served you as well? Alas, your reverence! there he is now, and I cannot get rid of him, and 'tis over the whole town that he has the meeting-house in possession."

"Tis an incredible story!" cried the Reverend Pettibones.

"'Tis a lie from beginning to end!" cried the Colonel.

"And now how shall I get myself out of my pickle?" asked Captain Obadiah.

"Sir," said Mr. Pettibones, "if what you tell me is true, 'tis beyond my poor powers to aid you."

"Alas!" cried Captain Obadiah. "Alas! alas! Then, indeed, I'm damned!" And therewith flinging his arms into the air as though in the extremity of despair, he turned and incontinently departed, rushing forth out of the house as though stung by ten thousand furies.

It was the most prodigious piece of gossip that ever fell in the way of the Reverend Josiah, and for a fortnight he carried it with him wherever he went. "'Twas the most unbelievable tale I ever heard," he would cry. "And yet where there is so much smoke there must be some fire. As for the poor wretch, if ever I saw a lost soul I beheld him standing before me there in Colonel Belford's library." And then he would conclude: "Yes, yes, 'tis incredible and past all belief. But if it be true in ever so little a part, why, then there is justice in this – that the Devil should take possession of the sanctuary of that very heresy that would not only have denied him the power that every other Christian belief assigns to him, but would have destroyed that infernal habitation that hath been his dwelling-place for all eternity."

As for Captain Belford, if he desired privacy for himself upon Pig and Sow Point, he had taken the very best means to prevent the curious from spying upon him there after nightfall.

IIHOW THE DEVIL STOLE THE COLLECTOR'S SNUFFBOX

Lieutenant Thomas Goodhouse was the Collector of Customs in the town of New Hope. He was a character of no little notoriety in those parts, enjoying the reputation of being able to consume more pineapple rum with less effect upon his balance than any other man in the community. He possessed the voice of a stentor, a short, thick-set, broad-shouldered person, a face congested to a violent carnation, and red hair of such a color as to add infinitely to the consuming fire of his countenance.

The Custom Office was a little white frame building with green shutters, and overhanging the water as though to topple into the tide. Here at any time of the day betwixt the hours of ten in the morning and of five in the afternoon the Collector was to be found at his desk smoking his pipe of tobacco, the while a thin, phthisical clerk bent with unrelaxing assiduity over a multitude of account-books and papers accumulated before him.

For his post of Collectorship of the Royal Customs, Lieutenant Goodhouse was especially indebted to the patronage of Colonel Belford. The worthy Collector had, some years before, come to that gentleman with a written recommendation from the Earl of Clandennie of a very unusual sort. It was the Lieutenant's good-fortune to save the life of the Honorable Frederick Dunburne, second son of the Earl – a wild, rakish, undisciplined youth, much given to such mischievous enterprises as the twisting off of door-knockers, the beating of the watch, and the carrying away of tavern signs.

Having been a very famous swimmer at Eton, the Honorable Frederick undertook while at the Cowes to swim a certain considerable distance for a wager. In the midst of this enterprise he was suddenly seized with a cramp, and would inevitably have drowned had not the Lieutenant, who happened in a boat close at hand, leaped overboard and rescued the young gentleman from the watery grave in which he was about to be engulfed, thus restoring him once more to the arms of his grateful family.

For this fortunate act of rescue the Earl of Clandennie presented to his son's preserver a gold snuffbox filled with guineas, and inscribed with the following legend:

"To Lieutenant Thomas Goodhouse, who, under the Ruling of Beneficent Providence, was the Happy Preserver of a Beautiful and Precious Life of Virtuous Precocity, this Box is presented by the Father of Him whom He saved as a grateful acknowledgment of His Services.

Thomas Monkhouse Dunburne, Viscount of Dunburne and Earl of Clandennie.

August 17, 1752."

Having thus satisfied the immediate demands of his gratitude, it is very possible that the Earl of Clandennie did not choose to assume so great a responsibility as the future of his son's preserver entailed. Nevertheless, feeling that something should be done for him, he obtained for Lieutenant Goodhouse a passage to the Americas, and wrote him a strong letter of recommendation to Colonel Belford. That gentleman, desiring to please the legitimate head of his family, used his influence so successfully that the Lieutenant was presently granted the position of Collector of Customs in the place of Captain Maull, who had lately deceased.

The Lieutenant, somewhat to the surprise of his patrons, filled his new official position as Collector not only with vigor, but with a not unbecoming dignity. He possessed an infinite appreciation of the responsibilities of his office, and he was more jealous to collect every farthing of the royal duties than he would have been had those moneys been gathered for his own emolument.

Under the old Collectorship of Captain Maull, it was no unusual thing for a barraco of superfine Hollands, a bolt of silk cloth, or a keg of brandy to find its way into the house of some influential merchant or Colonial dignitary. But in no such manner was Lieutenant Goodhouse derelict in his duties. He would have sacrificed his dearest friendship or his most precious attachment rather than fail in his duties to the Crown. In the intermission of his duties it might please him to relax into the softer humors of conviviality, but at ten o'clock in the morning, whatever his condition of sobriety, he assumed at once all the sterner panoply of a Collector of the Royal Customs.

Thus he set his virtues against his vices, and struck an even balance between them. When most unsteady upon his legs he most asserted his integrity, declaring that not a gill or a thread came into his port without paying its duty, and calling Heaven to witness that it had been his hand that had saved the life of a noble young gentleman. Thereupon, perhaps, drawing forth the gleaming token of his prowess – the gold snuffbox – from his breeches-pocket, and holding it tight in his brown and hairy fist, he would first offer his interlocutor a pinch of rappee, and would then call upon him to read the inscription engraved upon the lid of the case, demanding to know whether it mattered a fig if a man did drink a drop too much now and then, provided he collected every farthing of the royal revenues, and had been the means of saving the son of the Earl of Clandennie.

Never for an instant upon such an occasion would he permit his precious box to quit his possession. It was to him an emblem of those virtues that no one knew but himself, wherefore the more he misdoubted his own virtuousness the more valuable did the token of that rectitude become in his eyes. "Yes, you may look at it," he would say, "but damme if you shall handle it. I would not," he would cry, "let the Devil himself take it out of my hands."

The talk concerning the impious possession of the Old Free Grace Meeting-House was at its height when the official consciousness of the Collector, who was just then laboring under his constitutional infirmity, became suddenly seized with an irrepressible alarm. He declared that he smoked something worse than the Devil upon Pig and Sow Point, and protested that it was his opinion that Captain Obadiah was doing a bit of free-trade upon his own account, and that dutiable goods were being smuggled in at night under cover of these incredible stories. He registered a vow, sealing it with the most solemn protestations, and with a multiplicity of ingenious oaths that only a mind stimulated by the heat of intoxication could have invented, that he would make it his business, upon the first occasion that offered, to go down to Pig and Sow Point and to discover for himself whether it was the Devil or smugglers that had taken possession of the Old Free Grace Meeting-House. Thereupon, hauling out his precious snuffbox and rapping upon the lid, he offered a pinch around. Then calling attention to the inscription, he demanded to know whether a man who had behaved so well upon that occasion had need to be afraid of a whole churchful of devils. "I would," he cried, "offer the Devil a pinch, as I have offered it to you. Then I would bid him read this and tell me whether he dared to say that black was the white of my eye."

Nor were those words a vain boast upon the Collector's part, for, before a week had passed, it being reported that there had been a renewal of manifestations at the old church, the Collector, finding nobody with sufficient courage to accompany him, himself entered into a small boat and rowed down alone to Pig and Sow Point to investigate, for his own satisfaction, those appearances that so agitated the community.

It was dusk when the Collector departed upon that memorable and solitary expedition, and it was entirely dark before he had reached its conclusion. He had taken with him a bottle of Extra Reserve rum to drive, as he declared, the chill out of his bones. Accordingly it seemed to him to be a surprisingly brief interval before he found himself floating in his boat under the impenetrable shadow of the rocky promontory. The profound and infinite gloom of night overhung him with a portentous darkness, melting only into a liquid obscurity as it touched and dissolved into the stretch of waters across the bay. But above, on the high and rugged shoulder of the Point, the Collector, with dulled and swimming vision, beheld a row of dim and lurid lights, whereupon, collecting his faculties, he opined that the radiance he beheld was emitted from the windows of the Old Free Grace Meeting-House.

Having made fast his boat with a drunken gravity, the Collector walked directly, though with uncertain steps, up the steep and rugged path towards that mysterious illumination. Now and then he stumbled over the stones and cobbles that lay in his way, but he never quite lost his balance, neither did he for a moment remit his drunken gravity. So with a befuddled and obstinate perseverance he reached at last to the conclusion of his adventure and of his fate.

The old meeting-house was two stories in height, the lower story having been formerly used by the Free Grace Believers as a place wherein to celebrate certain obscure mysteries appertaining to their belief. The upper story, devoted to the more ordinary worship of their Sunday meetings, was reached by a tall, steep flight of steps that led from the ground to a covered porch which sheltered the doorway.

The Collector paused only long enough to observe that the shutters of the lower story were tight shut and barred, and that the dull and lurid light shone from the windows above. Then he directly mounted the steps with a courage and a perfect assurance that can only be entirely enjoyed by one in his peculiar condition of inebriety.

He paused to knock at the door, and it appeared to him that his knuckles had hardly fallen upon the panel before the valve was flung suddenly open. An indescribable and heavy odor fell upon him and for the moment overpowered his senses, and he found himself standing face to face with a figure prodigiously and portentously tall.

Even at this unexpected apparition the Collector lost possession of no part of his courage. Rather he stiffened himself to a more stubborn and obstinate resolution. Steadying himself for his address, "I know very well," quoth he, "who you are. You are the Divil, I dare say, but damme if you shall do business here without paying your duties to King George. I may drink a drop too much," he cried, "but I collect my duties – every farthing of 'em." Then drawing forth his snuffbox, he thrust it under the nose of the being to whom he spake. "Take a pinch and read that," he roared, "but don't handle it, for I wouldn't take all hell to let it out of my hand."

The being whom he addressed had stood for all this while as though bereft of speech and of movement, but at these last words he appeared to find his voice, for he gave forth a strident bellow of so dreadful and terrible a sort that the Collector, brave as he found himself, stepped back a pace or two before it. The next instant he was struck upon the wrist as though by a bolt of lightning, and the snuffbox, describing a yellow circle against the light of the door, disappeared into the darkness of the night beyond. Ere he could recover himself another blow smote him upon the breast, and he fell headlong from the platform, as through infinite space.

The next day the Collector did not present himself at the office at his accustomed hour, and the morning wore along without his appearing at his desk. By noon serious alarm began to take possession of the community, and about two o'clock, the tide being then set out pretty strong, Mr. Tompkins, the consumptive clerk, and two sailors from the Sarah Goodrich, then lying at Mr. Hoppins's wharf, went down in a yawl-boat to learn, if possible, what had befallen him. They coasted along the Point for above a half-hour before they discovered any vestige of the missing Collector. Then at last they saw him lying at a little distance upon a cobbled strip of beach, where, judging from his position and from the way he had composed himself to rest, he appeared to have been overcome by liquor.

At this place Mr. Tompkins put ashore, and making the best of his way over the slippery stones exposed at low water, came at last to where his chief was lying. The Collector was reposing with one arm over his eyes, as though to shelter them from the sun, but as soon as Mr. Tompkins had approached close enough to see his countenance, he uttered a great cry that was like a scream. For, by the blue and livid lips parted at the corners to show the yellow teeth, from the waxy whiteness of the fat and hairy hands – in short, from the appearance of the whole figure, he was aware in an instant that the Collector was dead.

His cry brought the two sailors running. They, with the utmost coolness imaginable, turned the Collector over, but discovered no marks of violence upon him, till of a sudden one of them called attention to the fact that his neck was broke. Upon this the other opined that he had fallen among the rocks and twisted his neck.

The two mariners then made an investigation of his pockets, the clerk standing by the while paralyzed with horror, his face the color of dough, his scalp creeping, and his hands and fingers twitching as though with the palsy. For there was something indescribably dreadful in the spectacle of those living hands searching into the dead's pockets, and he would freely have given a week's pay if he had never embarked upon the expedition for the recovery of his chief.

In the Collector's pockets they found a twist of tobacco, a red bandanna handkerchief of violent color, a purse meagrely filled with copper coins and silver pieces, a silver watch still ticking with a loud and insistent iteration, a piece of tarred string, and a clasp-knife.

The snuffbox which the Lieutenant had regarded with such prodigious pride as the one emblem of his otherwise dubious virtue was gone.

IIITHE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF QUALITY

The Honorable Frederick Dunburne, second son of the Earl of Clandennie, having won some six hundred pounds at écarté at a single sitting at Pintzennelli's, embarked with his two friends, Captain Blessington and Lord George Fitzhope, to conclude the night with a round of final dissipation in the more remote parts of London. Accordingly they embarked at York Stairs for the Three Cranes, ripe for any mischief. Upon the water the three young gentlemen amused themselves by shouting and singing, pausing only now and then to discharge a broadside of raillery at the occupants of some other and passing boat.

All went very well for a while, some of those in the passing boats laughing and railing in return, others shouting out angry replies. At last they fell in with a broad-beamed, flat-nosed, Dutch-appearing yawl-boat, pulling heavily up against the stream, and loaded with a crew of half-drunken sailors just come into port. In reply to the challenge of our young gentlemen, a man in the stern of the other boat, who appeared to be the captain of the crew – a fellow, as Dunburne could indefinitely perceive by the dim light of the lanthorn and the faint illumination of the misty half-moon, possessing a great, coarse red face and a bullet head surmounted by a mildewed and mangy fur cap – bawled out, in reply, that if they would only put their boat near enough for a minute or two he would give them a bellyful of something that would make them quiet for the rest of the night. He added that he would ask for nothing better than to have the opportunity of beating Dunburne's head to a pudding, and that he would give a crown to have the three of them within arm's-reach for a minute.

Upon this Captain Blessington swore that he should be immediately accommodated, and therewith delivered an order to that effect to the watermen. These obeyed so promptly that almost before Dunburne was aware of what had happened the two boats were side by side, with hardly a foot of space between the gunwales. Dunburne beheld one of the watermen of his own boat knock down one of the crew of the other with the blade of an oar, and then he himself was clutched by the collar in the grasp of the man with the fur cap. Him Dunburne struck twice in the face, and in the moonlight he saw that he had started the blood to running down from his assailant's nose. But his blows produced no other effect than to call forth a volley of the most horrible oaths that ever greeted his ears. Thereupon the boats drifted so far apart that our young gentleman was haled over the gunwale and soused in the cold water of the river. The next moment some one struck him upon the head with a belaying-pin or a billet of wood, a blow so crushing that the darkness seemed to split asunder with a prodigious flaming of lights and a myriad of circling stars, which presently disappeared into the profound and utter darkness of insensibility. How long this swoon continued our young gentleman could never tell, but when he regained so much of his consciousness as to be aware of the things about him, he beheld himself to be confined in a room, the walls whereof were yellow and greasy with dirt, he himself having been laid upon a bed so foul and so displeasing to his taste that he could not but regret the swoon from which he had emerged into consciousness. Looking down at his person, he beheld that his clothes had all been taken away from him, and that he was now clad in a shirt with only one sleeve, and a pair of breeches so tattered that they barely covered his nakedness. While he lay thus, dismally depressed by so sad a pickle as that into which he found himself plunged, he was strongly and painfully aware of an uproarious babble of loud and drunken voices and a continual clinking of glasses, which appeared to sound as from a tap-room beneath, these commingled now and then with oaths and scraps of discordant song bellowed out above the hubbub. His wounded head beat with tremendous and straining painfulness, as though it would burst asunder, and he was possessed by a burning thirst that seemed to consume his very vitals. He called aloud, and in reply a fat, one-eyed woman came, fetching him something to drink in a cup. This he swallowed with avidity, and thereupon (the liquor perhaps having been drugged) he dropped off into unconsciousness once more.

When at last he emerged for a second time into the light of reason, it was to find himself aboard a brig – the Prophet Daniel, he discovered her name to be – bound for Baltimore, in the Americas, and then pitching and plunging upon a westerly running stern-sea, and before a strong wind that drove the vessel with enormous velocity upon its course for those remote and unknown countries for which it was bound. The land was still in sight both astern and abeam, but before him lay the boundless and tremendously infinite stretch of the ocean. Dunburne found himself still to be clad in the one-armed shirt and tattered breeches that had adorned him in the house of the crimp in which he had first awakened. Now, however, an old tattered hat with only a part of the crown had been added to his costume. As though to complete the sad disorder of his appearance, he discovered, upon passing his hand over his countenance, that his beard and hair had started a bristling growth, and that the lump on his crown – which was even yet as big as a walnut – was still patched with pieces of dirty sticking-plaster. Indeed, had he but known it, he presented as miserable an appearance as the most miserable of those wretches who were daily ravished from the slums and streets of the great cities to be shipped to the Americas. Nor was he a long time in discovering that he was now one of the several such indentured servants who, upon the conclusion of their voyage, were to be sold for their passage in the plantations of Maryland.

Having learned so much of his miserable fate, and being now able to make shift to walk (though with weak and stumbling steps), our young gentleman lost no time in seeking the Captain, to whom he endeavored to explain the several accidents that had befallen him, acknowledging that he was the second son of the Earl of Clandennie, and declaring that if he, the Captain, would put the Prophet Daniel back into some English port again, his lordship would make it well worth his while to lose so much time for the sake of one so dear as a second son. To this address the Captain, supposing him either to be drunk or disordered in his mind, made no other reply than to knock him incontinently down upon the deck, bidding him return forward where he belonged.

Thereafter poor Dunburne found himself enjoying the reputation of a harmless madman. The name of the Earl of Rags was bestowed upon him, and the miserable companions of his wretched plight were never tired of tempting him to recount his adventures, for the sake of entertaining themselves by teasing that which they supposed to be his hapless mania.

Nor is it easy to conceive of all the torments that those miserable, obscene wretches were able to inflict upon him. Under the teasing sting of his companions' malevolent pleasantries, there were times when Dunburne might, as he confessed to himself, have committed a murder with the greatest satisfaction in the world. However, he was endowed with no small command of self-restraint, so that he was still able to curb his passions within the bounds of reason and of policy. He was, fortunately, a complete master of the French and Italian languages, so that when the fury of his irritation would become too excessive for him to control, he would ease his spirits by castigating his tormentors with a consuming verbosity in those foreign tongues, which, had his companions understood a single word of that which he uttered, would have earned for him a beating that would have landed him within an inch of his life. However, they attributed all that he said to the irrational gibbering of a maniac.