Indeed, added he,
I recollect an adventure of Mud Sam, the negro fisherman, many years
ago, which some think had something to do with the buccaneers. As we
are all friends here, and as it will go no farther, I'll tell it to
you.
"Upon a dark night many years ago, as Sam was returning from fishing in
Hell Gate--"
Here the story was nipped in the bud by a sudden movement from the
unknown, who, laying his iron fist on the table, knuckles downward,
with a quiet force that indented the very boards, and looking grimly
over his shoulder, with the grin of an angry bear. "Heark'ee,
neighbor," said he, with significant nodding of the head, "you'd better
let the buccaneers and their money alone--they're not for old men and
old women to meddle with. They fought hard for their money, they gave
body and soul for it, and wherever it lies buried, depend upon it he
must have a tug with the devil who gets it."
This sudden explosion was succeeded by a blank silence throughout the
room. Peechy Prauw shrunk within himself, and even the red-faced
officer turned pale. Wolfert, who, from a dark corner of the room, had
listened with intense eagerness to all this talk about buried treasure,
looked with mingled awe and reverence on this bold buccaneer, for such
he really suspected him to be. There was a chinking of gold and a
sparkling of jewels in all his stories about the Spanish Main that gave
a value to every period, and Wolfert would have given any thing for the
rummaging of the ponderous sea-chest, which his imagination crammed
full of golden chalices and crucifixes and jolly round bags of
doubloons.
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