Half an hour later two bloody-minded sea-robbers slipped through the back gate of the Milford place and took their stealthy way out into the dunes. No fierce mustachios or hoop ear-rings marked them on this occasion as the Dread Destroyer or the Menace of the Main. The time did not seem favorable for donning their real costumes. So one went disguised as a dainty maiden in a short pink frock and long brown curls, and the other as a sturdy boy in a grass-stained linen suit with a hole in the knee of his stocking. But their speech would have betrayed their evil business had anyone been in earshot of it. One would have thought it was
“Wild Roger come again.
He spoke of forays and of frays upon the Spanish Main.”
Having real gold to bury made the whole affair seem a real adventure. They were recounting to each other as they dug, the bloody fight it had taken to secure this lot of treasure.
Down in a hollow where the surrounding sandridges sheltered them from view, they crouched over a small basket they had brought with them and performed certain ceremonies. First the pouch was wrapped in many sheets of tin foil, which Richard had been long in collecting from various tobacco-loving friends. When that was done it flashed in the sun like a nugget of wrinkled silver. This was stuffed into a baking-powder can from which the label had been carefully scraped, and on whose lid had been scratched with a nail, the names Georgina Huntingdon and Richard Moreland, with the date.
“We’d better put our everyday names on it instead of our pirate names,” Gory George suggested. “For if anything should happen that some other pirate dug it up first they wouldn’t know who the Dread Destroyer and the Menace of the Main were.”
Lastly, from the basket was taken the end of a wax candle, several matches and a stick of red sealing-wax, borrowed from Cousin James’ desk. Holding the end of the sealing-wax over the lighted candle until it was soft and dripping, Richard daubed it around the edge of the can lid, as he had seen the man in the express office seal packages. He had always longed to try it himself. There was something peculiarly pleasing in the smell of melted sealing-wax. Georgina found it equally alluring. She took the stick away from him when it was about half used, and finished it.
“There won’t be any to put back in Cousin James’ desk if you keep on using it,” he warned her.
“I’m not using any more than you did,” she answered, and calmly proceeded to smear on the remainder. “If you had let me seal with the first end of the stick, you’d have had all the last end to save.”
All this time Captain Kidd sat close beside them, an interested spectator, but as they began digging the hole he rushed towards it and pawed violently at each shovelful of sand thrown out.
“Aw, let him help!” Richard exclaimed when Georgina ordered him to stop. “He ought to have a part in it because he found the pouch and was starting to bury it his own self when I took it away from him and spoiled his fun.”