Legend of the Paymaster's Gold

by Jo Shawyer

  “That sounds like a lot,” said Sam, “but it’s only shillings. We have to convert it to pounds. Twenty shillings to a pound.”

  “Right. So 109,200 shillings divided by twenty gives £5,460.”

  “And at two dollars for each pound, that’s more than $10,000!”

  “That’s amazing!”

  “That’s worth going for!”

  Chapter

  Eight

  October 25, 1813

  Everything is going wrong. Cousin Ned is in America fighting against us. John has been ordered to go to fight at Niagara and Thomas Greenaway is going with him. Father is at his wit’s end. There is no one to help him with the heavy work. And a fox got into the chickens and killed four last night. Mother is so worried. One good thing is that Lucy and I can still be friends because John is fighting for the British and that pleases Lucy’s family because they are from England.

  The weather is very cold.

  A few days later, Ben arrived with his metal detector. Sam and Eadie collected a spade, several trowels, and a bucket, and they set off for Reservoir Hill. Eadie brought along her camera. She wanted to record the moment when they found the gold.

  “It’s not the cheapest machine and it’s not the most expensive one,” Ben explained. The metal detector was not very big or heavy. It looked like a wand. “But it hunts down to a depth of thirty centimetres or so and it can detect gold.”

  When the trio got to Reservoir Hill, Sam put his mind to work, imagining General Procter’s soldiers struggling up the hill with Captain Carroll and taking a stand against the Americans who were catching them up from behind. “If there was a paymaster with a box of gold,” he reckoned, “he would have left the road, and climbed up out of the ravine to the fields at the top, to get out of the way of the fighting on the road.”

  “Right,” Ben said. “So we stay on the top of the hill and try the fields on the north side of the road. We can keep the metal detector’s discrimination at low. There won’t be much junk in this field, probably no drink cans. It can pick up gold, silver, brass, lead, and copper.”

  Sam was impressed.

  Ben held the metal detector and Sam and Eadie walked beside him. He began at the edge of the field near the road and walked slowly back and forth, sweeping the metal detector in broad strokes in front of him. It was like mowing a lawn. They gradually worked their way back from the road into the middle of the field.

  At first it was exciting when the metal detector beeped. Sam and Eadie did the digging: some nails from the old fences, fence wire, and fence staples. They also found a rusty horseshoe. Ben was thrilled when they found an arrowhead — not from the metal detector because the arrowhead was made of stone. They turned it up while digging for something else. By the time they had finished with the field, they had unearthed five musket balls.

  Eadie’s eyes were shining with excitement. She kept peering up and down the field, and back toward the edge of the ravine and the hairpin bend in the road. “Can’t you imagine it! Captain Carroll standing here, firing on the Kentucky Riflemen and trying to haul the wounded out of harm’s way.”

  Ben was caught up in Eadie’s excitement. “And everyone cheering when the Americans backed off down the hill.”

  Finding the musket balls right where the legendary skirmish took place made it all so real.

  “This proves it’s definitely not a legend,” Sam said, holding out a fist full of musket balls. “You can prove lots of things without having them written in official documents.”

  “Absolutely! Like archaeologists do,” Ben agreed, wiping the sweat off his face. “Let’s take a break. I need some shade.” They collapsed in the grass under shady trees at the edge of the field. Ben reached for his sunscreen. It was so hot that there were no birds around — they must have been resting in the shade, too.

  After a while, Sam got to his feet, ready for more work with the metal detector. “Let’s do that field on the south side of the road now.” He slapped at the grasshoppers jumping at his legs.

  “No way,” Ben said. “That’s Old Tucker’s land. He won’t let anyone on it. He never lets Dad and me take the metal detector on that field.”

  “Why not?” Sam was indignant.

  “Just because. He’s like that.”

  “What a creep. What’s the good of searching the field on this side of the road if you can’t search the field on the other side of the road? The gold could be in either one. That gives us only a 50 percent chance of finding it.” Sam kicked at a stone and sent it flying.

  Ben shrugged. He’d had run-ins with Old Tucker before. He was a crabby old man on a run-down farm, with fiercely protective dogs. Ben wasn’t prepared to push it.

  “Tucker is one of the original pioneer families. I saw it on the maps in the library. The Tuckers were here by 1812,” Eadie piped up.

  “Old family. Old grump,” was Ben’s only comment.

  There didn’t seem much else they could do. All their hopes that the metal detector would find the gold were dashed. And Old Tucker just didn’t seem fair.

  Eadie stood up and reached into her knapsack. She pulled out her notebook and opened it to the map she had drawn at the library. “I’ve got another idea.”

  Sam and Ben peered at the sketch map over her shoulder.

  “Dave at the library said that there were four conditions of settlement for when a settler could apply for the grant to his land from the government. The first two conditions don’t matter so much to us, that he had to help clear the road and clear trees. But we could use the other two conditions. The settler had to build a log house 16 by 20 feet, and it had to be 100 feet back from the road. I’ve drawn that here, see? I’ve made it to scale.”

  She pointed at the sketch map. “See, these are the measurements. We could take a line 100 feet from the road and follow it parallel to the road through the fields. Say from our house west toward the top of Reservoir Hill. The log cabins would have been built along that line. We can’t see them now because they were torn down years ago, but the metal detector might pick up some old bits of metal, like a spoon or a buckle or a horseshoe, where the cabins used to be!”

  “Or a coin!”

  “Right. And we can look for any patterns on the ground which give a 16 by 20 foot rectangle. Maybe an old foundation…?”

  “I see,” Ben said slowly. “We should ignore the newer houses along the road, then, so we can find the old pioneer pattern of houses.”

  “You sound just like Dave,” Eadie laughed.

  Sam and Ben looked at each other. Eadie waited.

  Finally, they both exclaimed, “Brilliant, Eadie!”

  “Where do we start?”

  Eadie grinned. “Well, our shed-room doesn’t make any sense. It’s not connected with the rest of the house, so maybe it was built first, maybe even by 1812! And then the rest of the house was built around it in 1865. Think about those wide floorboards, like the ones at pioneer museums.”

  “A log cabin!” Sam exclaimed.

  “Let’s go!” Ben said, picking up his metal detector.

  They walked back along Commissioners Road to Sam and Eadie’s house. Sam got their dad’s measuring tape.

  Sam and Ben measured the shed-room carefully while Eadie held her breath.

  The room measured 16 by 20 feet!

  “Incredible!” Sam shouted. “Just the size of a log cabin.”

  “This is looking good!” Ben cheered.

  “Quick!” Eadie said. “Let’s measure the distance to the road.”

  They didn’t have a long enough measuring tape, though. They had to estimate it. They measured their strides on the tape and then counted the number of strides. Sam, Eadie, and Ben each walked from the house to the road and back again, and made calculations, and then they compared notes. One hundred and ten feet, they decided. That qualified as being at least 100 feet back from the road, which was the settlement regulation.

  Ben held up his metal detector. “Shall we give this a try?”


  He swept the wand back and forth around the outside walls of the shed-room. They found the usual wire and nails, but they also found half a pair of scissors and a broken horseshoe. But there was no outstanding response from the metal detector that might indicate a box of gold buried nearby.

  The external walls of the shed-room were clad in white brick, just like the rest of the house. It looked exactly like part of the house. They peered underneath: the foundation was built up with fieldstone. But, on further inspection, they noticed that the foundation of the whole house was fieldstone. So that didn’t get them anywhere.

  They decided to mark off 100 feet from the road and follow the line parallel to the road and through other people’s properties looking for log cabin sites. They would sweep along the line with the metal detector, heading west toward the brow of Reservoir Hill.

  It was slow work. They swept through the field around their house. It was flat and hadn’t been ploughed in forever. They saw no trace of any cabin. All they turned up were some old nails.

  The next field belonged to a neighbour, so they had to stop and ask Mrs. Swain for permission to go into the field and to use their metal detector. They explained that they were looking for log cabins, for a school project. Well, who knows, we might need a project for a history fair sometime, Eadie thought as she smiled, crossed her fingers, and told the little white lie. They didn’t tell Mrs. Swain about General Procter or the Legend of the Paymaster’s Gold.

  It turned out, though, that there was nothing in that field other than the usual bits of metal and fencing. If there had been a cabin, it would probably have been where the Swains’ front lawn was now. But the lawn had been transformed by landscapers who had brought in new topsoil and covered up whatever had been there before. If there ever had been a log cabin there, they would never find traces of it now.

  They went on to the next neighbour’s field. The Hanburys’. Once again, they went through the explanation of why they wanted to go into the field with a metal detector. Mr. Hanbury gave permission, so they began their long, careful sweeps.

  It was Sam who bumped into the pile of rocks, overgrown with weeds. But it was Eadie who realized what it was.

  “Those rocks are the same size as the ones for the foundation of our shed-room,” she said. “Maybe whoever used this field after the log cabin was gone gathered all the foundation stones in one place so he could plough the rest of the field.”

  They swept the metal detector out in all directions from the rock pile, hoping to catch something within the ever-widening circle. At first, they found the usual things — nails and a horseshoe. Then they found a buckle, perhaps from a horse’s harness. But, best of all, they found a bent and twisted spoon! Eadie was delighted. They couldn’t really be exact about the site of a cabin, but it was quite easy to see that the number of finds were fewer as they went out in all directions from the rock pile.

  “This has got to be a log cabin site!” Ben grinned and switched off the metal detector.

  “This is so cool.” Sam and Ben high-fived.

  Eadie looked around the field in amazement. It wasn’t just an abandoned field now: it was a settler’s cabin. A settler who might have seen General Procter go by all those years ago, or heard the Kentucky Riflemen shooting their muskets at Captain Carroll! If their shed-room had been a log cabin, and this site was, too … anything was possible. She looked west toward the next field. It was the closest to the top of Reservoir Hill and the closest to where Procter’s skirmish had taken place. If there had been a cabin there, it would have been the handiest one for any paymaster wanting to hide his gold….

  But Ben interrupted her thoughts. “This is it, guys. That next field is Old Tucker’s place. We can’t go there.”

  Chapter

  Nine

  November 1813

  Father and Mr. Tucker agree that the war is foolish. Nobody is winning and everyone is starving. There were fires west of here last night. American raiders were burning settlers’ barns. Father spent all day digging pits in the woods to hide our grain. And Mother and I went back and forth carrying sacks of grain to bury. We cannot let the Americans steal our grain. Father does not know what to do about the cows. The Americans steal cattle as well as grain. We could walk them deep into the woods, away from the road and away from the American raiders, but then bears might attack them.

  The builders came to begin work on the shed-room the next day. John was the boss and his son, Brad, was his mate. They stood in blue jeans and work boots, side by side, staring at the floor where Sam and Eadie had stripped back the layers of old linoleum, revealing wood underneath.

  “That’s some old floor,” John said. He took off his baseball cap and scratched his grey head thoughtfully. “How old is this house?”

  “The woman Mum and Dad bought it from, Mrs. Foster, said that it was built in 1865,” Eadie said.

  “I’m surprised to see floorboards as wide as these in a house built as late as 1865. You need very old trees from the primeval forest to get planks as wide as these.”

  “They’re as wide as the logs you see in log cabins,” Brad said. He knelt down to look at them more closely.

  Eadie caught her breath. Maybe, just maybe, the shed-room is from earlier than 1865!

  Liz turned to the twins. “Since the builders are starting today, I want you to keep out of their way and not bother them. I’d like you to do outside work for me. The lawn needs mowing and the flower bed needs weeding. There’s lots to do.”

  “But, Mum,” they protested in unison. “Ben’s coming over.”

  “He can help, and stay for the day. We’ll have a barbecue and hamburgers for supper. You can make some brownies if you like, this afternoon.”

  Silence.

  “Anyway, I want you to stick around home today in case the builders need anything. But they know that they can call me at work if they need to. I’m late. Got to go.” And she dashed out the door.

  Ben came soon after. He pitched in to help Sam and Eadie dig over the flower bed and mow the lawn. After a while, Eadie stopped weeding and got up from her knees. She wiped her dirty hands on her shorts.“You know our shed-room, Ben, with its wide-plank floorboards?”

  Ben nodded.

  “The builders think the planks are as wide as you would find in log cabins!”

  Ben grinned. “This is getting better and better!”

  “Exactly. Mum told the builders that she wanted them to break through the wall of the shed-room into the kitchen because she wants a door there. I can’t wait to see what the builders find when they cut the hole!”

  Sam kept going around to the back of the house to peek in at John and Brad. “They’re awfully slow,” he complained.

  Just before lunch, they heard a shout. They dashed around to the shed-room to see what was up.

  “You’ve got a surprise here.” John grinned. “Take a look at this.”

  He had rigged up a light to see by since there were no windows in the shed-room. He and Brad had pulled off the rough plaster on the wall so they could break through into the kitchen.

  “It’s logs!” Sam and Eadie and Ben exclaimed together. “The wall is made of logs!”

  “It’s my log cabin,” shouted Eadie.

  Sam and Ben whooped and shouted.

  John and Brad laughed. “We’ve come across this kind of thing before. A log cabin inside a bigger house. I guess that when people could afford to build themselves a proper house, it made sense to keep the old cabin for storage or whatever.”

  “But when do you think the log cabin was built?” Eadie asked anxiously.

  “I couldn’t tell you that. You say the house was built in 1865? Who knows how old the log cabin was by then.”

  “Do you think it was built by 1812?” Sam blurted out.

  “I’m no good at history.” John laughed. “You’ll have to look that up in the books. But this road, Commissioners Road, was here then, you know. Have you ever heard about the Legend of the Paymas
ter’s Gold?”

  Ben laughed.

  Sam groaned.

  But Eadie smiled politely. She was willing to listen to John’s version of the legend. Maybe she would hear something new, some detail she hadn’t heard before. “What’s that all about?”

  John leaned back against the log wall and crossed his arms against his chest. He thought for a moment. “It was the War of 1812. You know, when Canada and the United States fought each other. The British soldiers were here, to defend us. A general, Procter was his name, was escaping from the Americans and he came by here, on Commissioners Road, on his way east toward Lake Ontario, along with his soldiers. The Americans caught up with him, right here on the hill, you know, the hairpin bend, and there was a scuffle. Anyway, the Americans went off and Procter went on his way. But somewhere in the skirmish his gold went missing. They say that the gold was to pay his soldiers.”

  Sam and Ben both spoke at the same time.

  “How much gold?”

  “Did anyone ever find it?”

  John picked up his lunch box from the floor and headed outside for a bit of fresh air. Sam and Eadie and Ben followed him. “A lot of gold, I suppose. I don’t think it was ever found because people still tell the story. I heard it when I was a kid. Everybody who grew up around here has heard it.”

  John sat down on the woodpile and opened his lunch box. Brad sat down beside him. But Eadie had one more question.

  “Do you think the gold was truly lost, in a field or something, or do you think it was hidden away for safe keeping?”

  “Well, then. We won’t know that until it’s found.” And John turned his attention to his sandwich.

  Sam, Eadie, and Ben went back into the shed-room. It was amazing to look at the wall of logs. Eadie placed her hand on the logs and felt their angled surfaces. They had been roughly squared. She could see marks from the adze that had shaped them. She counted. “Five logs high. That’s not many. Look at the size of them. They’re huge! Who’d have thought … we thought that this shed-room was strange, but this is amazing!”