Pirate Gold

Transcriber's note: The author consistently used a convention in which a long dash, used to indicate trailed off speech, follows the closing speech mark, rather than being enclosed within the speech mark. This convention has been retained throughout.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1896
Copyright, 1895 and 1896, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
Copyright, 1896, By F. J. STIMSON.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

It consisted of a few hundred new American eagles and a few times as many Spanish doubloons; for pirates like good broad pieces, fit to skim flat-spun across the waves, or play pitch-and-toss with for men's lives or women's loves; they give five-dollar pieces or thin British guineas to the boy who brings them drink, and silver to their bootblacks, priests, or beggars.
It was contained—the gold—in an old canvas bag, a little rotten and very brown and mouldy, but tied at the neck by a piece of stout and tarnished braid of gold. It had no name or card upon it nor letters on its side, and it lay for nearly thirty years high on a shelf, in an old chest, behind three tiers of tins of papers, in the deepest corner of the vault of the old building of the Old Colony Bank.