The day after I had this talk with Old Jacob I was rather surprised by
getting a telegram from my cousin Gregory Wilkinson, telling me that he
was coming down to pay us a visit, and would be there that afternoon. I
was not as much astonished as I would have been if the telegram had come
from anybody else, because Gregory Wilkinson had a way of telegraphing
that he was going to do things which nobody expected him to do, and I
was used to it. Moreover, I had every reason for desiring to maintain
very friendly relations with him. He had told me several times that he
had made a will by which his large fortune was to be divided between
me and a certain Asylum for the Relief and Education of Destitute Red
Indian Children that he was very much interested in; and he had more
than hinted that the asylum was not the legatee that was the more to be
envied. This made me feel quite comfortable about the remote future, but
it did not simplify the problem of living comfortably in the immediate
present. My cousin was a very tough, wiry little man, barely turned of
fifty. There was any quantity of life left in him--his father, who had
been just such another, had lived till he was eighty-nine. There was not
much of a chance, therefore, that either the asylum or I would receive
anything from his estate for ever so long--and I may add I was very
glad, for my part, that things were that way. Gregory Wilkinson was a
first-rate fellow, for all his queerness and sudden ways, and I should
have been sorry enough to have been his chief heir. One reason why I
liked him so much was because he was so fond of Susan. When we were
married--although he had not seen her then--he sent her forks, and he
had lived up to those forks ever since.
Susan was rather flustered when I showed her the telegram; but she went
to work with a will, and got the little spare room in order, and stewed
some peaches and made some biscuits for supper. Susan's biscuits were
something extraordinary. Gregory Wilkinson came all right, and after
supper--he said that it was the nicest supper he had eaten in a long
while--she did the honors of the Swallow's Nest in the pretty way that
is her especial peculiarity. She showed him the cow-stable, with the cow
in it, and the colored girl milking away in her usual vigorous fashion,
the chickens, the garden, the peach-trees, and the nest under the eaves
where the swallows had lived when we first came there. Then, as it grew
dark, we sat on the little veranda while we smoked our cigars--that is,
Gregory Wilkinson and I smoked: all that Susan did was to try to poke
her finger through the rings which I blew towards her--and I told why we
had come down there, and what a good start we had made towards finding
my great-great-great-uncle's buried money. And when I had got through,
Susan told how, as soon as I had found it, we were going to Europe.
We neither of us thought that Gregory Wilkinson manifested as much
enthusiasm in the matter as the circumstances of the case demanded; but
then, as Susan pointed out to me, in her usual clear-headed way, it was
not reasonable to expect a man with a fortune to be as eager to get one
as a man without one would be.
"Very likely he'll give us his share for finding it," said Susan; "he
don't want it himself, and it would be dreadful to turn the heads of all
those destitute red Indian children by leaving it to them."
I should have mentioned earlier that, so far as we knew, my cousin and I
were my great-great-great-uncle's only surviving heirs. The family
luck had not held out any especially strong temptations in the way of
pleasant things to live for, and so the family gradually had died off.
Whatever my search should bring to light, therefore, would be divided
between us two.
By the time that Old Jacob got through with his boat-painting, Gregory
Wilkinson had gathered a sufficient interest in our money-digging to
volunteer to go along with us to the bay. We had a two-seated wagon,
and I took with me several things which I thought might be useful in
an expedition of this nature--two spades, a pickaxe, a crow-bar, a
measuring tape that belonged to Susan, an axe, and a lantern (for, as
Susan very truly said, we might have to do some of our digging after
dark). I took also a pulley and a coil of rope, in case the box of
treasure should prove so heavy that we could not otherwise pull it out
from the hole. Old Jacob knew all about rigging tackle, and said that
we could cut a pair of sheer-poles in the woods. We were very much
encouraged by the confident way in which Old Jacob talked about cutting
sheer-poles; it sounded wonderfully business-like. Susan, of course, was
very desirous of going along, and I very much wanted to take her. But
as we intended to stay all night, in case we did not find the treasure
during our first day's search, and as the only place where we could
sleep was an oysterman's shanty that Old Jacob knew about, she saw
herself that it would not do. So she made the best of staying at home,
in her usual cheery fashion, and promised, as we drove off, to have a
famous supper ready for us the next night--when we would come home with
our wagon-load of silver and gold.
It was a long, hot, dusty drive, and the mosquitoes were pretty bad
as we drew near the coast. But we were cheered by the thought of
the fortune that was so nearly ours, and we smoked our pipes at the
mosquitoes in a way that astonished them. After we had taken out the
horses and had eaten our dinner (Susan had put us up a great basket of
provisions, with two of her own delicious peach pies on top) we walked
down to the bay-side, with Old Jacob leading, to look for the place
where the _Martha Ann_ used to anchor. I took the tape-measure along,
both because it might be useful, and because it made me think of Susan.
I was sorry to find that the clearer the lay of the land and water
became, the more indistinct grew Old Jacob's remembrance of where his
father had told him that the schooner used to lie.
"It mought hev ben about here," he said, pointing across to a little bay
some way off on our left; "an' agin it mought hev ben about thar," with
a wave of his hand towards a low point of land nearly half a mile off
on our right; "an' agin it mought hev ben sorter atwixt an' at ween 'em.
Here or hereabouts, thet's w'at I say; here or hereabouts, sure."
Now this was perplexing. My plan, based upon Old Jacob's assurance that
he could locate the anchorage precisely, was to hunt near the shore for
likely-looking places and dig them up, one after another, until we
found the treasure. But to dig up all the places where treasure might be
buried along a whole mile of coast was not to be thought of. We implored
Old Jacob to brush up his memory, to look attentively at the shape of
the coast, and to try to fix definitely the spot off which the schooner
had lain. But the more that he tried, the more confusing did his
statements become. Just as he would settle positively--after much
thinking and much looking at the sun and the coast line--on a particular
spot, doubts would arise in his mind as to the correctness of his
location; and these doubts presently would resolve themselves into
the certainty that he was all wrong. Then the process of thinking and
looking would begin all over again, only again to come to the same
disheartening end. The short and long of the matter was that we spent
all that day and a good part of the next in wandering along the bay-side
in Old Jacob's wake, while he made and unmade his locations at the
rate of about three an hour. At last I looked at Gregory Wilkinson and
Gregory Wilkinson looked at me, and we both nodded. Then we told Old
Jacob that we guessed we'd better hitch up the horses and drive home. It
made us pretty dismal, after all our hopes, to hitch up the horses and
drive home that way.
My heart ached when I saw Susan leaning over the front gate watching for
us as we drove up the road. The wind was setting down towards us, and I
could smell the coffee that she had put on the fire to boil as soon as
she caught sight of us--Susan made coffee splendidly--and I knew that
she had kept her promise, and had ready the feast that was to celebrate
our success; and that made it all the dismaller that we hadn't any
success to celebrate.
When I told her how badly the expedition had turned out she came very
near crying; but she gave a sort of gulp, and then laughed instead, and
did what she could to make things pleasant for us. We had our feast, but
notwithstanding Susan's effort to be cheerful, it was about as dreary a
feast as I ever had anything to do with. We brought Old Jacob in and let
him feast with us; and he, to do him justice, was not dreary at all.
He seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Indeed, the most trying part of that
sorrowful supper-party was the way in which Old Jacob recovered his
spirits and declared at short intervals that his memory now was
all right again. He even went so far as to say that with his eyes
blindfolded and in the dark he could lead us to the precise spot off
which the schooner used to lie.
Susan was disposed to regard these assertions hopefully; but we, who
had been fumbling about with him for two days, well understood their
baselessness. It was not Old Jacob's fault, of course, but his defective
memory certainly was dreadfully provoking. Here was an enormous fortune
slipping through our lingers just because this old man could not
remember a little matter about where a schooner had been anchored.
After he had eaten all the supper that he could hold--which was a good
deal--and had gone home, we told Susan the whole dismal story of how our
expedition had proved to be a total failure. It was best, we thought,
not to mince matters with her; and we stated minutely how time after
time the anchorage of the schooner had been precisely located, and then
in a little while had been unlocated again. She saw, as we did, that as
a clew Old Jacob was not much of a success, and also that he was about
the only thing in the least like a clew that we possessed. Realizing
this latter fact, and knowing that his great age made his death probable
at any moment, Susan strongly advised me, in her clear-sighted way, to
have him photographed.