“That’s right. You might have been there in Wagram, and I might not have noticed you. Or somebody else might have given it to you and sent you to look for Chimney Pot. I was fairly well out of the idea when I couldn’t find the map among your stuff, and this morning when those fellows took your canoe, I figured they must be the map thieves, and that they figured your canoe was mine.”
“You haven’t told us about the canoe part,” Randy prodded him.
“Well, I was up just about daylight. You two were still asleep. I made myself a little breakfast, and was eating it, when I heard some sort of noise by the pier. At first I didn’t pay any attention, then I heard more noise—paddles dipping. I went out to the pier, and I saw a dugout with two men in it, towing your canoe away.”
“Those water rats!” squealed Jebs. “Why didn’t you call us?”
“I didn’t have time. I climbed down into my own dugout—they must have figured it for an Indian boat that belonged there—and I cast off and started after them. I followed them around a couple or three bends, and at last I came in sight of them and yelled. Maybe they thought there were several boats or several people chasing. Anyway, they turned the canoe loose and dug in and pulled away from me. They had two paddles to my one, and they looked grown-up to me, though I couldn’t be sure who they were. So I didn’t chase them. I towed your canoe back here.”
“Too bad we weren’t along, to catch them,” said Randy.
“Well,” finished Driscoll, “they’ve got the wrong map, at that.”
“What?” snorted Jebs.
“The map they took was drawn the plainest. I figure my great-grandfather, or somebody, must have made a copy of the older one. But it didn’t have the clue to the treasure.”
“You know,” said Randy, from the depth of his thoughts, “that pair must have done what you did, Driscoll. Working from the map they had, they paddled up to the triple fork, for a reference point. Probably they passed this landing after we were here and had set up our camp. They may even have spent the night there. Then, knowing about the canoe tied to the pier, they slipped down at early dawn and sneaked away with it—”
“Brilliant, Randy, but let Driscoll go on,” interrupted Jebs. “He says there’s a clue to the treasure. What is it?”
Driscoll turned the map over on his knees. On its back were faded letters.
“Read that,” said Driscoll, and they read:
HIGH AND LOW AND HOT AND COLD,
SET THE CROSS AND DIG THE GOLD.
“What does it mean?” asked Randy.
“We’ll find out when we get there,” replied Driscoll. “How about getting started?”
SIX
THE WAY TO CHIMNEY POT
THE BOYS looked at each other, and all of a sudden the three of them grinned.
They were excited. Each felt the excitement, in himself and in his comrades. For they had agreed to go on an adventure, with mystery and legend and danger and a whisper of golden treasure. This was the sort of thing you dreamed about, maybe read about, but very seldom did yourself.
“How about getting started?” said Driscoll again. “When I first saw you yesterday, I figured I had the map stealers, so I hung around to see how to mess you up. Then, when those two men passed by with your canoe back of their boat, I felt guilty about suspecting you, and I followed them and brought your canoe back again instead of dogging along after them. We’ve lost a big heap of time. Here, let’s pack all this baggage you’ve got with you.”
Stooping, he snatched up an empty mess kit and began to scrub it with a handful of pine straw. “You’ve got about a ton and a half of stuff,” he commented. “It must weigh nearly as much as that half million dollars in Confederate gold.”
His energy fired the other two. They hurried at cleaning up the rest of the utensils and throwing dirt on the fire. They gathered and buried the breakfast scraps. Randy unhooked the hammocks while Jebs packed the canvas bags. It was not more than five minutes before everything was lowered into the recovered canoe and lashed in place.
“Lead out, Driscoll,” called Randy. “This is your deal. We’ll follow along behind.”
“Wait,” said Driscoll. He sat on the pier, and spread out his map again. “Look here. Help me decide about this.”
They climbed back up to join him. “Decide what?” said Jebs.
“Just how far we’ll have to go to reach Chimney Pot. I told you, I had to paddle upstream to the fork to be sure where I was. Now we’re heading back down. But how far do we go before we get to where we’re going?”
There was no scale of miles on the map to help compute distances. It was only a picture of a long, snaky stretch of waterway, drawn in some detail, but with no clue to help decide how many miles were represented by an inch, or how many inches represented a mile.
“I guess it isn’t a very special map,” ventured Randy.
“No,” agreed Jebs. “What about the other one, the one they stole?”
“I told you about it. It was clearer than this, a newer copy of this one. I figure that’s why they decided to steal it. But it didn’t have any scale of distances, either.”
Randy bent close for a new study of the map. Chimney Pot House was plainly marked and labeled, but they had no notion of how far away it might be.
“Look,” said Jebs, pointing. “You see this little side branch that runs right up to your Chimney Pot front yard, almost. All we need to do is peel our eyes for where that branch opens into the main stream.
It’s on the right as we go down, see? Then we can turn up into it, and—”
“No good, Jebs,” Randy cut him off. “We’ve passed several side streams on both the right and the left, and they aren’t on the map at all.”
“That’s the way with my ideas,” mourned Jebs. “They’re swell until you speak up and show how sorry they are.”
“But here’s a hunch,” went on Randy. “Look at this line, drawn straight across the stream.” And he pointed to it.
“What is it, a bridge?” suggested Jebs.
“I doubt it,” said Driscoll. “They didn’t have bridges to amount to much back in those days. Not around here, anyway.”
“And probably it didn’t mean a bridge then,” said Randy cryptically. “But there’s a bridge now.”
Both Driscoll and Jebs stared at him.
“Hey, Randy, say that again,” coaxed Jebs. “Say it slow. I don’t get it.”
Randy laughed at his friend’s puzzled grimace. “What I mean is, that mark probably means a ford —a shallow place, where men could wade across the creek, or take horses or wagons or cattle over. See how the mark reaches out on each side, like a road or a trail? Well, that road probably exists today, and if so, there’s a bridge there, to cross on.”
“A road?” said Jebs. “Sure! And where would that road be going except to Wagram? Isn’t Wagram a sure-enough old town? I begin to get what you’re plugging at, Randy.”
“So do I,” seconded Driscoll. “Let’s see, how far down are we from that three-way fork?”
“Can’t say in miles,” said Jebs. “We paddled about an hour, coming from the forks to this landing.”
“I paddled a lot more than an hour, coming up from the Wagram bridge,” said Driscoll. “But I was coming upstream, not downstream.”
“Then let’s time ourselves as we go down,” suggested Randy. “That time, plus an hour, will be the time from the forks to the bridge. And how far from the bridge to the side branch, as Jebs calls it, that will lead us across to Chimney Pot?”
“Maybe twice as much distance from the bridge to the branch as there is from the forks to the bridge,” said Jebs.
Driscoll smiled his slight, close-lipped smile. “That’s what I call using your head, Randy,” he said.
“Not quite,” demurred Randy modestly. “I might not have thought of it, except that those mystery map stealers were up above here. I just thought to myself, why didn’t they head straight down toward Chimney Pot? And the answer came to
me, that they came up to some point—probably the forks—to check on their map. And they were checking not only direction, like Driscoll, but also distances. So I thought out the rest of it, and we can do what they’re doing.”
“It’s still using your head,” insisted Jebs.
“Well, you lead, Driscoll,” said Randy again, and Driscoll folded his map.
He lowered himself into his dugout, quickly untied the line at the bow, took up his paddle, and slid the dugout into the center of the stream. Jebs took bow position in the canoe, as on the previous morning, and Randy sat in the stern. Silently they moved out into the water and followed Driscoll.
They had time now to be aware of how wide were the brown waters, still densely thicketed and wooded along each shore, but open above, with the morning sun shining down through the space where leaves and branches did not meet. They felt as though they had known and traveled the stream for days. The splash of a snake dropping from a shoreside bush did not startle them. Even the buzzing insects seemed fewer and less bloodthirsty. A day and a night had made them sure of themselves upon this cloaked and hidden waterway.
But up ahead, they could not help but think, lay the unknown, perhaps real danger. The whisper of gold, lost and hidden since the final days of the Confederacy, had stirred someone to the theft of one of Driscoll’s maps. Anyone who would steal a map might be violent, even deadly, if overtaken and accused.
So ran the thoughts of Randy Hunter and Jebs Markum. But Driscoll, paddling quietly along in the lead, seemed completely calm and intent. His gray cap, legacy of a Southern soldier, remained slanted on his head with an air of nonchalance that had nothing in it of carelessness. He looked competent up there, and ready to face anything.
It took them an hour to reach the bridge across the Wagram road, and Randy, looking at his wrist watch and calling out the time, computed two hours of paddling from where the creek forked. It was nine o’clock in the morning. Twice two hours were four hours— they might expect to find the mouth of the little tributary stream that indicated the way to Chimney Pot four hours later, at one o’clock in the afternoon; if indeed Chimney Pot House was a reality, and not only a dim legend that existed on an old, old map and nowhere else.
The story of the lost gold of the Confederacy had thrilled both Jebs and Randy. As they paddled along in the wake of Driscoll’s dugout, they talked about it in hushed tones.
“Seems to me I’ve heard about just such a thing right often,” said Jebs, “but now I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of echo about all this tale from the Drowning Creek country, carried up there into Moore County and dressed up by people telling it one to another and always adding to it. Maybe they borrowed that old yarn about Captain Kidd’s treasure, out on the Carolina coast.”
“No, the treasure was real,” Randy assured his friend. “I’ve been digging back into my memory. The history books mention it, and there have been lots of interesting things written these last few years about the Civil War—”
“The War between the States,” corrected Jebs hastily. “Better learn to say that.”
“Well, the War for Southern Independence, if you want it that way,” chuckled Randy. “Anyhow, as I was saying, several books have mentioned that treasure trove. It was half a million dollars, as Driscoll said, and part of it was in bullion—bars of gold— and the rest in various kinds of coinage. There were United States pieces and others, from foreign countries. And half a million dollars’ worth of gold, the way they reckoned its value then, would weigh a lot.” “Would it? How much?” demanded Jebs, who liked figures.
Randy pondered. “I think they valued gold at about sixteen dollars an ounce. Maybe a trifle more or less, but about that. Figure it out yourself.”
“I’m trying.” Jebs paddled quietly for several moments. Then he said, “Fifty dollars in gold would figure out to three ounces and one-eighth, wouldn’t it? Five hundred dollars would be thirty-one ounces and a bit over—”
“Call it three pounds,” suggested Randy. “Gold coins have a trifle of other metal mixed into them.”
“Okay, three pounds. Half a million dollars’ worth —five hundred thousand dollars—would be a thousand times fifty. Three thousand pounds. A ton and a half of solid gold.” Jebs whistled softly at his own reckoning. “Shoo! That would be a load for a truck, not a horse-drawn wagon. They must have needed several wagons, traveling so far.”
“And Driscoll thinks that that mess of money wound up at his old family home,” elaborated Randy. “Part of it, at least.”
“I still find it right hard to swallow that idea, Randy.”
“But the gold certainly vanished from history,” Randy argued. “If it vanished, it was still somewhere. Gold is one of the most durable things in nature.”
“Sure enough?”
“That’s one of the reasons why it’s been a standard of value for so many centuries. It doesn’t rust or tarnish away. Acids have a hard time making any impression on it. And it takes more than a thousand degrees of heat, centigrade, to melt gold. So that ton and a half of gold must exist today, and if it isn’t still in an Abbeville warehouse it must have been carried away, bag by bag, the way Driscoll says his greatgrandfather did with what two horses could handle. In fact, that’s the first sensible story I’ve ever heard that even tried to explain what finally happened to the Confederacy’s treasury.”
“It’s sure enough too heavy to blow away,” agreed Jebs. “Well, I’m ready to be convinced, whenever anybody shows me the gold.”
“There’s a couple of men who already believe in it,” said Randy.
That sobered them again. They had halfway forgotten that a rival expedition was on the track of the lost treasure. And that rival expedition had already proved itself ready to steal—it might be ready to fight, too.
In the boat ahead, Driscoll suddenly sat up straight and lifted his paddle above his head, holding it crosswise with both hands. That was the signal which, with military scouts, means “enemy in sight.” Jebs and Randy slowed the progress of their canoe, and came alongside of Driscoll.
“What do you see?” whispered Jebs.
Driscoll pointed toward the right bank where, on a low, shelf-like stretch, rose wisps of smoke.
Quietly they let themselves drift closer, straining their eyes. No motion showed on the bank, no sign of a human figure. Finally they headed in, let the noses of canoe and dugout ride up on the soft mud, and sprang out.
There lay the remains of a smouldering fire. Jebs grunted his disgust.
“They don’t even have sense enough to put out their own fire,” he growled, and began to scrape damp earth with his foot, as though to quench the last remaining coals.
“Hold it, Jebs; let’s not cover up any evidence,” warned Randy, kneeling to study the ground. “Look, this was a cooking fire, all right, and not too long ago somebody was eating breakfast here. There’s where they emptied the coffee pot.”
He pointed to where a soggy spatter of grounds, still moist, lay beside the fire.
“Who do you mean by they?” asked Jebs.
“The map stealers, who else?” rejoined Driscoll.
He and Jebs watched Randy expectantly, as though they trusted his powers of deduction. Randy still knelt by the fire, and his eyes traveled slowly and carefully over the ground on all sides.
“There were two,” he said at length.
“You mean the two that tried to steal your canoe,” nodded Driscoll.
“You can see their tracks here,” added Randy.
“I see lots more than two tracks,” Jebs spoke up.
“Yes, because they tramped around, getting their fire started and so on. But the tracks come in two sizes. Here”—Randy pointed to some clear marks —“is a pretty big foot, in a heavy, blunt-toed shoe— a work shoe or a farmer’s shoe. And here’s somebody a shade smaller, in finer-made footgear.”
“I can see that,” announced Driscoll.
“Yep, after Randy explained to you,”
scoffed Jebs.
“Elementary,” quoted Randy. “I judge these two breakfast-eaters have been gone from here maybe an hour.”
“They had that much start, maybe a little more, when we left that Indian’s landing,” said Driscoll.
“They didn’t stay here long,” said Randy. He pointed to where a body had pressed down some grassy scrub toward the rise of the bank. “One of them lay down a little while. They must have made quick work of eating. I judge they didn’t wait to have breakfast this morning, they were in a big hurry to sneak away with what they thought was Driscoll’s canoe. But they can’t have been gone very long, or their bits of firewood would be all burned away to ashes.”
“That figures, all right,” said Driscoll.
Randy got to his feet. “If they’re only an hour ahead of us at this point, we’ll have to be careful. We want to get close to them, if possible, and yet we don’t want to get so close as to tangle with them. Because they may be armed.”
“I’ve been thinking that same thing,” said Driscoll.
“Then just what do we do when we find them?” Jebs asked, almost plaintively.
“Spot them so we can recognize and identify them,” decided Driscoll. “Then see if they try to find the treasure, that should belong by rights to my family. And we can also prove whether they planned ahead of time to swindle me out of it, because we can head back to Wagram and see if the same men bought coffee and sandwiches and candy bars for the trip.”
Randy shoved dirt over the last of the fire. Now he looked at his watch.
“It s about a quarter past ten,” he said, “and we’ve been here maybe fifteen minutes. That means three hours, give or take a few minutes, until we come to that side stream that will guide us the rest of the way to Chimney Pot.”
They drank from one of the canteens, pushed their two craft out into the stream, and started down again.
The morning wore on, while dugout and canoe glided around curve after curve of the tree-ramparted, shadow-patched stream. Twice they paused for a brief rest, and to renew the daubing of insect repel- lant to discourage a myriad nibbling gnats and mosquitoes. Sharply they watched both banks, as well as the stream ahead of them, for signs of the two strangers they followed.
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1951 Page 5