by Jo Shawyer
“What else can it be?” Eadie asked. “It fits. We’re here, right at the cabin nearest where the skirmish was.”
The boys continued to sift through the earth for coins. Eadie took out her camera and photographed the site and the boys digging and the coins laid out on an old piece of plastic bag. “We’ve got to record the discovery!”
When the boys realized that Eadie wasn’t in any of the pictures they took some pictures of her with the spoons and pacing the perimeter of the 16-by-20-foot cabin site.
Finally, after a lot of sifting through the soil with their fingers, they found fewer and fewer coins.
“That’s it,” Sam said. “It looks as though we’ve got them all.”
Ben did a final sweep with the metal detector. It was quiet.
“We’ve got to get these home,” Sam said, sitting back on his heels. “We should hide them until we can clean them and figure out what they are.”
The bucket was too small, so Sam and Ben took off their T-shirts and wrapped the extra coins in them. The coins were very heavy. Eadie slathered Ben’s back with sunscreen so he wouldn’t get burned.
They were exhausted and starving, but triumphant. They laughed and whooped all the way home. They just couldn’t believe it.
“Ben, if you hadn’t had a metal detector!”
“Eadie, if you hadn’t found out about the four conditions of settlement!”
“Sam, if you hadn’t stood up to Old Tucker!”
They decided not to tell Old Tucker or their parents anything. Not yet. They wanted to gloat over the coins first, enjoy the fact that they’d actually found them. And find out what they were worth. They’d tell Old Tucker tomorrow when they knew more about the coins.
The trio walked back up Commissioners Road, lugging the dead weight of the coins, and didn’t complain a bit!
“Let’s hide the coins in the root cellar,” Eadie suggested.
“But what if John and Brad come again tomorrow,” argued Sam.
“We can’t let the coins out of our sight,” Ben said very firmly.
“Okay,” Sam shifted the weight of his T-shirt-bag of coins. “We’ll have to hide them in my bedroom.”
“Yeah!” Eadie agreed. “You never allow anyone into your bedroom anyway. Mum definitely won’t go in there.” She paused. “Oh, no! Mum is on a decorating rampage now, checking out all the rooms: which need papering, plastering, painting. She just barges in!”
Ben looked a little anxious. Then he had an idea. “What about the abatis?”
Sam and Eadie turned to him.
“Brilliant!”
“Cool!”
“We could sleep out there tonight,” Ben suggested.
“Just for fun,” Sam agreed.
“And to guard the gold!”
That night, the trio slept behind the abatis. In a tent.
They even dug a hole to bury the gold. Ben dragged his sleeping bag across the hole and slept on top of it. “No one’s going to steal this gold!”
Settled in the tent, they decided to look up the price of gold. Sam had remembered to bring his iPhone with him to the tent. He switched it on. The battery icon flickered and died. He threw it down on his sleeping bag in frustration. “The battery’s dead!”
“Sam!”
They couldn’t believe it. They were dying with curiosity to know the value of the coins.
“We can’t go inside the house, Sam. Mum and Dad will only ask questions.” Eadie reached into her knapsack and pulled out a section from yesterday’s newspaper. “Look, guys. Here’s the closing prices for commodities.”
Ben laughed. “Eadie wins again!”
They focused their flashlights on the newspaper.
“Wow! Gold is $963.55 a troy ounce!”
“But what’s a troy ounce?” Ben asked.
“Well, a normal pound is 16 ounces, at least in cooking recipes,” Eadie answered. “But I don’t know how much a troy ounce is.” She glanced down the page. “Silver is $14.58 a troy ounce. That’s not much. And copper is $2.73 a pound. Even less.”
“The gold’s the thing.”
“And there’s heritage value, too. Like, what will collectors pay if the coins are rare?”
“Don’t forget that it’s fifty-fifty with Old Tucker.”
“That’s a promise.”
Chapter
Fourteen
November 1814
The Americans came again. It was terrible! They stole money and burned everyone’s place along the Thames River. Mills, barns, haystacks. Everything! We saw the fires west of here and people ran ahead to warn us. Father drove the cows into the woods and made Mother and I stay with them. He climbed the big oak tree and said he would shoot at anyone who set fire to our hay rick or cabin. We stayed in the woods until daylight. Then Father came to rescue us. In the end, he said that the raiders were so tired and drunk that they probably could not see straight. Anyway, they are gone. Thomas Greenaway came home from Niagara and he is terribly wounded. He cannot use his right arm. We have not heard from John since last Christmas. Mother is sick with worry.
The next morning, Liz Jackson peered around behind the abatis to see check on Sam, Eadie, and Ben. They were all asleep. She smiled and went off to work.
After breakfast — well, lunch, really — which consisted of waffles and maple syrup, the trio started to work. They set up in the kitchen. Eadie washed the coins in the kitchen sink and scrubbed them with a toothbrush. Sam and Ben set up the laptop on the kitchen table and Googled the coins. It quickly became confusing. They discovered that a troy ounce was one twelfth of a pound, not one sixteenth like in cooking. They realized that the value of the coin was, at the minimum, its weight of metal. But the business of rarity was harder to understand.
They were puzzled, too, because the coins were so difficult to recognize. Who were these people whose heads were on the coins? Lots of the words didn’t seem to be English. They recognized some French. And guessed that some were Spanish. Why was that? When Upper Canada was a British colony?
“Dollars. Guineas. Shillings. Florins. Livres. Doubloons. Pistareens. Florins.”
“This is crazy!” Sam said. “Who can help us figure it out?
“Dave! At the library. He’ll know,” Eadie suggested.
“We were going to ask him to come to see the abatis anyway,” Ben said.
Sam phoned Dave.
He had just put his cellphone down when there was a terrific racket outside.
“It’s Old Tucker’s dogs!” Ben cried.
Sam looked out the window. “It’s Old Tucker himself. He doesn’t look too happy.”
They let him in. But not the dogs.
Old Tucker was in an angry mood. “I’ve seen that bloody great hole you dug in my field. Where’s the gold? And where’s my share?”
Sam and Ben turned to Eadie and silently willed her to turn on the charm. Which she did, of course.
“Mr. Tucker, let us explain. We did find the gold in your field. We dug it up and brought it home and kept it safe for you. Look.” She pointed to the pile of coins on the kitchen table.
Mr. Tucker looked. And looked. And looked. He couldn’t believe the pile of coins, how shiny the gold ones were. “That’s amazing! You really did find it. I never thought you would … just kids playing detective.” He pulled out a kitchen chair, sat down, took off his tattered old hat and grinned and grinned and grinned.
“We’ve been trying to identify them. They’re from all different countries, not just England,” Sam explained.
“And we’re Googling to try and find out their rarity value,” Ben added.
“What’s Googling?” Mr. Tucker asked.
When Liz and Tom arrived home, Sam, Eadie, and Ben were still in the kitchen. The coins were in a heap on the table and Mr. Tucker was poking his stubby fingers at the keyboard of the laptop.
“Scroll down, now, Mr. Tucker.” Ben was showing him how to surf the Web. “Now, choose from the menu….”
; “What’s going on here?” Liz asked.
“We found the gold! We found the gold!”
“We found the paymaster’s gold!”
Now it was Tom and Liz’s turn to be amazed. “I never thought … it was just a legend! How did you ever…?” Liz stammered.
There was a jumble of explanations. Sam and Eadie and Ben all talked at once: “The plaque in the park … Dave at the library… the Web … Phoebe McNames’s gravestone…. The settlement regulations … Ben’s metal detector … the shed-room … the 1809 piece of pottery … we drew maps.”
“But,” Eadie said generously “we couldn’t have done it without Mr. Tucker. He gave us permission to dig up his field.”
“Is that where you found it?” Tom’s mind was jumbled in confusion. He was thinking, Mr. Tucker? That cantankerous neighbour? And he’s here, sitting in our kitchen, happy as a lamb. That must mean that it’s Mr. Tucker’s gold. It was found on his property.
Sam spoke quickly before his parents started asking any more questions. “We have a deal with Mr. Tucker, Dad. Fifty-fifty.” He turned to Mr. Tucker. “Right?”
Mr. Tucker beamed. “Right.” He shook Sam’s hand to confirm it.
Ben said, offhand, “We think that this lot might be worth about $5,000.”
“We’ve asked Dave at the library to come over and have a look. Maybe he can help us identify some of the coins,” Eadie added.
Tom and Liz looked at each other, bewildered. This situation was beyond their control. They were mere bystanders. Sam, Eadie, and Ben had done it all: read up on the history, figured out the probable location of the gold, and won over Mr. Tucker. It was all too incredible.
“And, Mr. Tucker,” Eadie said, ignoring her parents, “I took a photograph of that silver spoon that we found at your place and I Googled it. I figured out the hallmark. It was made in London, England, in 1789. And the maker’s mark, too. It was made by Hester Bateman. She was a famous lady silversmith. That spoon must be worth about $2,000 just by itself.”
Mr. Tucker smiled at Eadie and shook his head in amazement. Sam high-fived him.
Liz picked up the phone and held it out to Ben. “Ben, call your parents and ask them to come over. They’ve got to hear this.” She smiled. “I’ve got some pizzas in the freezer. You’ll stay for supper, Mr. Tucker?”
Mr. Tucker beamed his pleasure.
Just then, Dave arrived on his bike and there were introductions all around. He was really glad to meet Mr. Tucker. He knew that Mr. Tucker was descended from one of the original pioneer families. And now he discovered that Mr. Tucker had the original copy of the Tucker land grant, Dave was hoping that he would lend this to the library for a history exhibit.
Supper was a lot of fun. Everyone was excited.
They all crowded around the kitchen table, eating pizza, with the pile of coins in the middle of the table. Across the room was the exposed wall of the log cabin, alias the shed-room. That log wall helped everyone to get their head around the reality of pioneer times on Commissioners Road.
Ben’s parents were as astonished as Sam and Eadie’s parents. They just couldn’t believe how Sam, Eadie, and Ben had figured everything out. Ben’s mum drew a sketch of Mr. Tucker, sitting in the kitchen, looking so happy, friends with everyone now. And Ben’s dad was eager to see the shed-room and the log wall. He said that he would bring over an auger and figure out the years of growth in the logs.
Dave took a lot of photographs of the log wall. He was boggled. “If you guys ever need a history project for Mr. Grimshaw, you’ve got one in spades!”
And it was the first time that Mr. Tucker had eaten pizza! He was quite a picture sitting there with tomato sauce dribbling down his chin. He didn’t seem like scary Old Tucker now.
Eadie showed everyone the pieces of broken pottery they’d found at Mr. Tucker’s place. “I Googled it,” she said. “Dymoke and Dymmick and, finally, Dymock. That’s what it is — a village in Gloucestershire, England. That’s where your family came from, isn’t it, Mr. Tucker?”
“Yes, that’s the story. I had heard it was Dimmock but didn’t know where in England it was or how it to spell it. You’re really quick on the computer, Eadie!”
Eadie smiled.
“I think I know what these pieces of pottery are,” Ben’s mum said. She turned to Mr. Tucker. “You say that your family first came here in 1809. I think that these pieces are from a special cup, a gift, that was made for the Tuckers by their friends in Dymock, to wish them well on their immigration to Canada. It would have been called a commemorative cup — to commemorate the occasion. See how big the letters are: bigger than would fit on an ordinary cup or mug. The cup would have been as big as a bowl and probably had two handles to lift it.”
“It would have held a lot of beer!” Tom laughed.
Dave answered lots of questions about the coins. He explained that at the time of the War of 1812 there was very little coinage in the Canadian colonies because they were not allowed to mint their own coins. So all the English coins had to be sent out from London. And people used whatever coins they could get their hands on — even from different countries, like Spain and France. Anyway, it was so early in settlement that there were few families and few towns. Everyone grew their own food, and hunted and fished and money was not used much because there was nothing to buy. No shops. No services. No banks.
“When the war broke out, there was a real problem about buying supplies for the army,” Dave explained. “There weren’t enough coins circulating in Upper Canada to pay the soldiers and because of the war at sea it was risky to send shiploads of money out from England. So the military had the idea of printing Army Bills.” He looked hard at Sam, Eadie, and Ben. “That was paper money, which the paymaster would have used instead of coins. He used it to buy food — flour, butter, meat, vegetables for the soldiers, and oats for the horses. The farmer or merchant could take the Army Bills to a government agent and it was treated like real money. So,” Dave said, very slowly, “it will be remarkable if all these coins really were a paymaster’s gold.”
No one paid much attention to what Dave said. They were too excited by the shiny gold coins.
After supper, they set to work. Every coin was studied, turned over, discussed, and Googled for more information. Eadie photographed each coin, both sides. They tried to figure out the countries but many of the coins were in poor condition. They were so worn and the lettering so difficult to see that they couldn’t Google them. They sorted those they could read by country: England, France, United States, Spain, Mexico, Portugal. Some weren’t proper coins at all. Dave said that they were tokens issued by merchants, copying the idea of the Army Bills.
“Here’s a token,” Eadie said as she pulled it out of the pile.”It just says ‘Good for 5 cents in merchandise.’ I wondered why it didn’t have a country’s name or king on it!”
They tried to get their minds around an early Upper Canada, lacking in towns and stores and banks. The merchants coping with all these different coins from different countries. But, with the help of the Internet and Dave, they started to understand how the system worked. They learned that sometimes the same coin had a different value. For example, if you lived in Upper Canada, you used a conversion scale called York currency, taking its name from New York. A Spanish dollar would be worth eight shillings York. But if you lived in the Maritimes, you used a scale called Halifax currency, which followed the system in Massachusetts. Then, a Spanish dollar would be worth five shillings. But in England, the Spanish dollar would be worth four shillings sixpence!
“I’d go crazy if I had a shop back then,” Sam said. “How would you keep it all straight?”
But then Dave said, gently, “Well, let’s sort the coins by date. See if it tells us anything more.”
That’s when they saw it.
It was so obvious.
Once they focused on dates rather than countries.
“Some of these coins have dates after 1814,” Sam said, slowly.
“The latest one is 1848,” Ben said.
“It’s not our paymaster’s gold,” Eadie said, disappointed.
Everyone looked at the piles of coins on the table. They fell silent. How could this not be the paymaster’s gold from the War of 1812?
Sam, Eadie, and Ben looked at each other. They couldn’t believe it. After all the work they’d done — the research on the Web and in the library, figuring out the location of the old log cabin sites, hours out in the broiling sun with the metal detector, risking their lives with Mr. Tucker’s dogs….
Dave broke the silence.
“That’s history,” he said. “Tricky stuff, history. You always know what you know. But you never know what you don’t know.”
Eadie looked at Sam and Ben. “Remember? We always said that we would find gold, somebody’s gold, even if it wasn’t General Procter’s paymaster’s gold.”
“But we always thought, whatever gold we found, that it would be from the War of 1812.” Sam got up from his chair and paced around the kitchen.
“Everyone used Commissioners Road, Sam,” Tom said. “It was the main road for years after the War of 1812. This could be anyone’s money. A later paymaster, a rich man’s, a merchant’s. Perhaps it was stolen and hidden by a thief.”
Sam flung himself back in his chair. “I can’t stand it! Not to know.”
“But why was this money never found, for all this time?” Ben asked. “Whose was it? If a Tucker hid it, then it would have been claimed at some point, you would think. Who hid it, if it wasn’t a Tucker?”
Mr. Tucker shook his head. He didn’t know. There was no story in his family about hidden gold.
Eadie had been quiet while Sam raged. Now she spoke up. “So there’s still a Legend of the Paymaster’s Gold. We found gold, but we didn’t solve the legend.” She fingered the coins on the kitchen table.
Sam pushed his hair out of his eyes and calmed down a little. “We still get to keep the gold! And we know that it’s worth a lot of money!”