by Howard Pyle
“Why, so it is!” cried Jack, “why, so it is, Tom! This is a half a dollar, and so is this, and this, and this! Why, Tom, here’s another, and another! Great heavens, Tom! the sand’s covered with them!”
And so it was. Here and there would be two or three lying together, but in most cases they were scattered about like shells at high water mark. Jack sat down quite overcome, and then began laughing in a foolish sort of a way, but there was a catch in his laugh that sounded mightily like crying. “Tom,” said he, “we’re rich men! Tom, did you ever see or hear of the like? Why, Tom—”
Then he stopped all of a sudden, and, scrambling to his feet, fell to gathering up the money as though he had been crazy.
For an hour or more they hunted up and down, picking up silver pieces as children pick up chestnuts under a chestnut tree. After a while they only found a few stray coins here and there, and finally they cleared the beach of them altogether. Then they sat down to count them. Tom had about two hundred dollars; Jack had gathered more nearly three hundred than two. Altogether they had a little less than five hundred dollars between them.
“Where do you suppose they came from, Tom?” said Jack, after a while. He was sitting on the sand when he spoke, holding a lot of the coins in his hand and turning them over with his fingers.
Tom shook his head. This was the same thought that had been puzzling him for some time past, and, as yet, he had not been able to answer it.
After a while they went back to their hut, carrying their money with them. Jack was very talkative and excited, but Tom was as silent as the other was noisy, for he was pondering over the matter of Jack’s question — Where did they all come from?
Where did they all come from? He thought and thought till his brain was muddled with his thinking. Could there have been a treasure buried here by the buccaneers in times past? It was a wild thought, but Tom was ready for any kind of wild thought at the time. But then the date of the coin that he had found — 1792 — that was long after the time of the buccaneers. He picked up another piece and looked at it; it also bore the same date, 1792, and so did another and another; they were all of the same mintage. He did not know what to think of it.
Jack must have had a notion that Tom was puzzling his wits over this, for he sat beside the fire all of the evening without saying a word. Every now and then he arose and threw some more brushwood on the flames; beyond that he hardly moved, but sat in silence, watching Tom furtively.
“Tom,” said he, at last.
“Well, Jack.”
“Do you suppose that it could rain money?”
“Stuff and nonsense!”
“I don’t see any stuff and nonsense about it. I’ve heard of it raining stones, and why shouldn’t it rain money as well? We never found any before that hurricane came on us.”
“That’s true enough, Jack,” said Tom, “I hadn’t thought of that.” For the finding of this money had driven all thought of the hurricane out of his head.
“Then you think it might have rained money, after all?”
“No; I don’t think that.”
“Humph! Well, what do you think about it?”
“I don’t know what to think about it; but you’ve put a new idea into my head.”
It was later than usual when they went to rest that night. Tom laid awake hour after hour, his thoughts as busy as bees. Where had the money come from? This was the question that ran through his brain unceasingly, keeping him awake as the silent night moved along. And then, why should all the coins bear the same date of 1792?
Suddenly the whole thing opened before him, and he saw it all as clearly as I see the hand before my face. He could hardly help shouting aloud, but he bethought him that Jack might be asleep, and that it would be a pity to awaken him.
“Jack,” whispered he, in a low voice.
“Helloa!” said the other, quickly, for he was wide awake.
“I think I’ve found it out!”
“Found out what?”
“Found where the money came from.”
“Well, where did it come from?” said Jack, and Tom could see in the gloom that he sat up in his excitement.
“Did you notice that all the money bore the same date, 1792?” said Tom.
“No; I didn’t notice that.”
“Well, it did, and, what’s more, it’s all Spanish money.”
“But where did it come from?” said Jack.
“Jack,” said Tom, slowly, “as sure as I’m lying here, that wreck on the sand-spit is the wreck of a Spanish treasure ship.”
“Tom!” shouted Jack, “you’re right! What a fool I was not to think of that! Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face!”
No doubt you who read this have guessed the matter long ago, and have wondered that Tom and Jack were so dull of wits as not to have thought of it before. But the idea never entered their heads that a fortune was lying buried in the sand that covered the poor old wreck that had been so constantly before their eyes for almost a year, and when they found money like pebbles along the beach, it never struck them that it could have been washed out of those crumbling ribs, whose only value had been that they gave them a rusty spike every now and then.
Jack was wild to go out into the night, and to hunt for money there and then, and it was as much as Tom could do to quiet him and make him lie down and try to get a little sleep. Of course, neither of them caught a wink, and both were stirring at the dawn of day.
They hardly ate a bite of food before they set to work.
By noontide Tom had made a couple of rude shovels, the blades of which were of the plankings of the cutter over their heads, and the handles of which were two straight limbs, cut from the neighboring thicket. It was a long tedious piece of work to make these shovels, for Tom had no tools to work with but Jack’s knife, and only half of the blade of that was left. Tom labored steadily at the shovels, but Jack was very impatient at the slowness of the work, and was continually urging him to hurry matters. I suppose that he was back and forth from the hut to the wreck a dozen times in the course of the morning.
But at last the shovels were finished. Tom tried to persuade Jack to eat a bite before he went to work, but Jack would have nothing to do with food; he shouldered the two shovels and started away to the sand-spit, leaving Tom to cook and eat his dinner by himself. When Tom went over to the wreck a half an hour later, he found Jack busily at work, and a great hole already scooped out in the sand, — but Jack had not yet found a cent of money.
I do not think that they had any idea of what they were undertaking, and what a tremendous piece of work it was that lay before them. I confess that Tom was as foolish as Jack, in having a notion that all they would have to do would be to scoop away a little sand, and pick up money by the handful; but they found nothing either on that day or the next, or the next, or for a week or more to come. Jack began to be very much discouraged, and said more than once that he was certain that Tom had been mistaken in his notion that the wreck was that of a treasure ship.
Tom himself began to be a little down-hearted, and more than once suspected that he had made a wrong guess. But when he brought to mind that the money was of one mintage, and, from the way in which it lay, that it was plainly washed out of the wreck by the water that had flowed over the sand-spit at the time of the hurricane, he would feel reassured that he was right, though he could not account for the reason why a part of it should have been washed up, while the rest seemed to lie so deeply beneath the surface. So he managed to keep Jack pretty steadily to his work, though, as the days dragged along and nothing came of their labor, it became a great task to do so.
But on the tenth day they made a find. They were just about to give up their work for the evening, when Tom unearthed a small, wooden box. It was about a foot long, six inches wide, and three or four inches deep. It was very rotten, and fell to pieces as Jack tried to pick it up. It was full of money, which tumbled all in a heap as the box crumbled in Jack’s hand. The money must have be
en in rolls when it was put into the case, for there were scraps of mouldy paper mixed with it, and some of the coins had bits of paper glued to them by the black rust that had gathered upon them.
This was the first money that they found by digging, and Jack nearly went crazy over it. Tom himself was very much excited, but he did not act as absurdly as Jack, who danced, and laughed, and shouted like one possessed. It was their first gleam of good luck, and it was a good thing that it came when it did, for it was speedily followed by the worst of ill fortune.
That night there came a south-east storm that did great damage. It had been brewing all of the afternoon, but Tom and Jack had not seen it, or, if they had seen it, had thought nothing of it, for heretofore the wash of the surf had never run as far up as the wreck, even in the heaviest weather. But so much of the sand had been carried away that the surf came a great deal higher than it had done before. It was blowing quite heavily when Tom and Jack went over to the sand-spit the next morning, and a part of the wash of the breakers had found its way into the place that they had been digging, so that the sand had caved in here and there. They tried to do all that they could to protect their work, but it was no good, for, by the time that evening had come, the place that they had dug out was half full of sand, and by the next morning it was nearly levelled over, and all of their labor was to be done again. As soon as the storm was over they set to work, and in a week’s time had the sand nearly all dug out. Then came another blow, and the same thing happened as before.
After this they set about the work with more system. They built a breakwater of stakes, between which they wove twigs and grass. This was Tom’s plan, and they found that it kept the sea back completely, for, as I have said, it was only the wash of the breakers that ran over the place that they were at work. It never filled up again as long as Tom and Jack were engaged upon it.
But all this cost a great deal of time and labor, and I doubt very much if they had not found the box of money whether they would ever have struck a shovel into the sand again after the first storm came upon them; so that it was a lucky thing that they found the box when they did, and that the southeaster did not come a day sooner.
For three or four months they worked as never men worked before. It is strange to think of how men will labor and toil for money, even when money will do them as little good as it did Jack and Tom on this lonely island. It is a wonder that they did not kill themselves with the work and the hardships that they went through during that time. However, the excitement that they were living under kept them up to a great degree.
During all these months they lived upon little else than fish. Now and then they would gather a few mussels or catch a crab or two, but their chief living was fish — broiled fish for breakfast, dinner and supper, until they both grew to loathe the very sight of it. Tom got such a surfeit of them in that time that he could never bear the smell of a frying fish from that day to this.
Upon the first of September they counted over the money that they had unearthed, and they found that they had over eight thousand dollars in all. It was made up of silver coins of all sizes, large and small.
They only had three days more of work on the island, and, as two of those days were blank, they did not add very much to the sum that they had already gathered.
CHAPTER XIII.
IT WAS THE morning of the 3d of September of the same year, — 1814.
Tom and Jack had just finished their breakfast; — it was of broiled fish. Hughy! It makes me shudder even now to think of it, for I do hate the very sight of a fish.
The work of digging at the wreck had settled down to a very jog-trot business by this time. Neither of the men were in a hurry to quit their comfortable seat on the sand and turn to hard work, that had lost all the savor of novelty it had had at first. The first day that they had struck shovel into the sand above the wreck, Jack had started off eagerly, without eating a bite; he was quite willing to eat a meal now, — even a meal of broiled fish — and to take a goodly while to the eating of it also. So they both sat dwadling over their unsavory food, not at all anxious to make a start.
“Well, Jack,” said Tom, at last; “I suppose that we might as well be stirring.”
“I reckon we might,” said Jack, and then he stretched himself, as a first step toward getting up.
At that moment a sound fell upon their ears. It was not one to which you would have given a second thought, and yet if it had been a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, it could not have startled the two more than it did.
When they had rebuilt their hut after it had been destroyed by the great hurricane, they had not located in the same spot in which they had lived before. An eddy of the wind had scooped a hollow out of the side of the sand hill, and it was in the side of this cup-shaped hollow that they had digged their house, and had roofed it in with the cutter as they had done before; for they thought that they would be more sheltered in this spot if another hurricane should come upon them. Looking from this hollow in front of them, they could see nothing but a part of the western ocean and the upper end of the sand-spit, whereupon they worked from day to day. It was just back of them, and from the crest or brim of this sandy bowl that the sound came that startled them so greatly.
It was the sound of a man’s voice.
“Ahoy there!”
For a moment Jack and Tom looked at one another without turning around. This minute I can see just how Jack stared at Tom; his mouth agape, and his eyes as big as saucers. But it was only for a moment that they sat looking at one another so amazedly, for the next instant they jumped to their legs and turned around.
A burly red-faced man was standing on the crest of the white sand hill, his figure sharply marked against the blue sky behind him. His hands were thrust deeply into his breeches pockets, and he stood with his legs a little apart. He had a short cutty pipe betwixt his teeth; — the bowl was turned topsey-turvey, and there was no light in it. When he saw that Tom and Jack were looking at him, he spoke again, without taking the pipe from out his mouth.
“Are you fellows the first and second mates of the Nancy Hazlewood, privateersman?”
Jack nodded his head.
The man turned and beckoned two or three times, and then came slowly and carefully down the steep side of the sand dun, half sliding, half stumbling. The first thing that he said when he came to where they were, was:
“I just tell you what it is, mates; that mess of fish smells mighty good.” Then he asked which of them was the first mate.
“I’m the first mate,” said Jack.
By this time three or four heads rose above the crest of the hill, and a little knot of sailors gathered on the top of the dun; then they came jumping and sliding and stumbling down to where the others were standing.
But all this time Tom was like one in a dream. I think that he must have been dazed by the suddenness of the coming of that for which he had longed so bitterly and so deeply. He tried to realize that they were rescued; that these men were about to take them away; that they were really to leave the island that had been their prison for so many long and weary days, and that in a few weeks at the furthest, he would be in Eastcaster again, and would see Patty, and would be talking with her of all these things. Many a time in the silence of the lonely night, he had pictured their rescue to himself, and in the sleep that followed, he had perhaps dreamed that a boat was lying on the beach below their hut, and then had wakened to the bitterness of its being only a dream. But now that rescue had in truth come to them, he could no more realize it than you or I can realize that we are really to see the other world, some time to come. So he stood leaning against the poor old shattered cutter that had sheltered Jack and him for so long, and as he leaned there he looked about him, wondering dully, whether or not he would not awaken in a few minutes and find this too to be only a dream. He heard the man who had hailed them, telling Jack that he was the first mate of the barque Baltimore, of Baltimore, and that they were bound for New York from Key West, havi
ng run fifty miles out of their course to pick them up at this island. He heard him ask Jack which one of them had set the bladder of porpoise hide adrift, that the Baltimore had picked up off the Florida coast, and saw that Jack jerked his thumb toward him, and that the mate of the Baltimore was looking at him, and was saying that it was a d — d clever Yankee trick. He saw the sailors crowding around, looking here and there; peeping and prying into the doorway of the hut, and talking amongst themselves. “Blast my eyes, Tommy, look at this here shanty!” “Well, I’m cussed if they hain’t got a ship’s boat slung up for a roof!” “Damme! look at his beard and hair; (this in a hoarse whisper) he’s the second mate, Bill; — Granger, you know.”
Then he heard Jack ask the mate of the Baltimore for a chew of tobacco. He cut off the piece of the plug with his old broken jack-knife, and Tom watched him doing it as though it was a matter of the greatest moment to him. I can recollect that he thought dully how Jack must enjoy his tobacco after having been so long without it.
After a while there was a movement, and he heard Jack calling to him to come along, as they were all going over to the boat, but it was still in the same dazed state that he walked along the beach with the others until they came around the end of the sand hills, saw the bay open before him, and the barque floating like a swan upon the smooth surface of the water. A ship’s boat was lying high and dry on the sand of the beach, and two sailors were sitting in the stern, smoking comfortably and talking together. They tumbled out of the boat and stood looking as the others drew near, and Tom thought what a strange sight Jack and he must be — ragged, tattered, patched, half-naked, with beards reaching to their breasts, and heads uncovered, excepting for the mat of hair that hung as low as their shoulders. He had not thought of their looking strange before this.
So they reached the boat, and Tom stood for a moment looking down into it and at the oars lying along the thwarts within. Then he and Jack and Mr. Winterbury (the first mate) climbed in and the boat was shoved off, grating on the sand as it moved into the water. There was a rattle of oars dropped into the rowlocks, and then the regular “chug! chug!” of the rowing. He looked back and saw the island and the beach and the white sand hills that he knew so well dropping slowly astern. It seemed very strange to be looking at them from the ocean. At last they were close to where the barque was slowly rising and falling upon the heaving of the ground swell that came rolling in around the point of the sandy hook beyond. This is the way in which their rescue came.