“Then pirates tore all the hearths up, mighty nigh, that night. They had a stonemason along, with crowbars and chisels, an’ such like tools. He was a tombstone worker, an’ I reckon his biz queered the job, for we found nothing at all.”
“’Tain’t in a hearthstone,” said the woman, suddenly. “Is there anything about a house named pillow? He kep’ a-talkin’ about a pillow—I thought he meant the one he had his head on.”
Jasper Binnhart started as with a galvanic shock. He suddenly let down the forelegs of his chair and sat stiff and upright.
“Pillar?” he said, in a curiously muffled tone. “Has this mansion of Duciehurst got anything like a porch with posts? I have never seen the river-front of the house.”
“Posts!” exclaimed the younger Berridge. “The porch has got posts the size of a big gum tree, a round dozen, too, an’ mighty nigh as high as a gum tree.” He fell to steadily picking his teeth with a fish-bone, and idly riding his chair to and fro.
“What did he say about ‘pillars,’ Mrs. Berridge?” asked the blacksmith, eagerly.
“He talked about a base, an’ a pilaster, an’ columns, an’ a capital.”
“That’s Jackson, capital o’ Miss’ippi, seat of government, second to none in the Union,” explained her husband.
“Sometimes he would call ‘Archie, Archie.’”
“Lieutenant Archibald Ducie as sure as you are born,” said the shanty-boater, solemnly. “He died in Vicksburg, an’ he war the one rumored to have had charge of hidin’ the money.”