The woman hesitated. She noted her father-in-law behind the stove, almost collapsing over his pipe, so inert he might scarcely make shift to fill it; her husband, his younger image, was still at the table, lazily chasing the last morsel of fish about his greasy plate with a bit of cornbread. Little might they hope to metamorphose the babble of a dreamer into discoveries of value. Jasper Binnhart, on the contrary, was a man of force, of action, the leader, the prime mover, in every scheme that had brought to them some measure of success and gain, and then, too, would she not be present, to aid, to hear, invested with the mystery and controlling its preservation.
She took on the air of retrospective pondering as she sank down in a chair on one side of the table, putting her bare elbows on the cloth and supporting her chin in her hands. “Lemme see,” she said, “ef I kin call any of his gabble to mind.” She glanced up to find Binnhart’s eyes, contracted to mere points of light, fixed upon her, and once more she bent her gaze on the pattern of the damask.
“’Twar mos’ly ’bout Duciehurst, all night, all night. Duciehurst was the word.”
“That sounds like something doing,” Binnhart remarked. “All my life I have heard of hidden money at Duciehurst.”
Jessy Jane ceased to pose. She lifted her head suddenly with the contempt of the uninformed, her lips thickening with a sneer. “Now, what fool would put money in that old ruined shell, instead of a bank?”
“Why, lots of folks, during the war,” explained Binnhart. “The banks were not open then, and people hid their vallybles wherever they could. After the peace some things, here and there, were never found again.”
“Why, shucks, Mrs. Berridge, the name of Duciehurst is famous for hidden treasure, has been ever since I could remember,” the shanter-boater said. “You see, Major Ducie and two of his sons were killed in the war, an’ only one was left, this passenger’s father.” He jerked his thumb toward the bar, where the boat lay so still in the night, amidst its element of surging waters. “This son, being so young at the time, just a child, didn’t know anything about where they had stowed the family silver and jewels, and a power of gold money, they say.”
“The family gave up the search more than forty years ago, and the place was sold to satisfy a mortgage,” Binnhart commented.
“But the river folks take up the search every wunst in a while, an’ go thar and dig around the walls,” said the younger Berridge.
“Sure!” exclaimed the shanty-boater. “I have been thar myself with a git-rich-quick gang.” He leered humorously at the party from behind the stove-pipe. Presently he continued reminiscently:—