“Nasty work,” communed the pirate with himself, “but a safe place to lay up a penny for a rainy day! Let me see. These two bags of doubloons, and the small one my Gibbs brought me, with those three, there, of guineas, and those sacks of dollars, will make about ten thousand pounds. That will make me a nest-egg when I retire from the profession and return to Scotland. They will have forgotten all my boyish follies by that time.”
Captain Brand alluded to forging his father’s name, and other little peccadilloes of a similar nature.
“And I may be elected to Parliament––who knows? It is something of a risk, perhaps, to leave all this pretty coin here, but then it’s a greater risk to carry it in the schooner”––he argued both ways––“and then, again, damp does not decay pure metal. But,” thought Captain Brand, “suppose somebody should discover this little casket 142 in the rock. Ah! that’s not probable, for no soul besides myself knows of it, and even the very man who made the door did not know for what it was intended; besides, he died long ago.”
Captain Brand had forgotten, in this connection, that the man who cut out the stone chamber and door, and fashioned the hinge and lock, took too much sugar in his coffee the morning the job was finished, and died in horrible convulsions before night. Oh yes, that incident had entirely escaped his memory!
Captain Brand, having now thoroughly reasoned the matter out, gave each of the bags lying on the sand a gentle kick to get a responsive echo from the coin; and then creeping out of the treasure-chamber, he withdrew the torch, removed the stone, and the heavy slab fell again into its place. Then clasping the lock, covering it over with sand, and rolling back the stone, he seized the torch and quickly returned to the vault beneath his saloon. There, putting out the torch by rubbing it against the stone pavement until not a spark was left, by the sunlight, streaming through the loopholes around, he passed to one side and began removing the cases of cochineal, silks, and what not, near to the strongly-barred portcullis door, which opened toward the basin fronting his dwelling. It was hard work, but Captain Brand seemed to enjoy it; and even after he had arranged the packages intended for shipment in his compadre’s felucca, he began again. Going to the farther corner of the vault, he stopped before a strong mahogany door, and taking a key from his pocket, unlocked and threw it wide open. It was as black as night inside, floored and lined with wood, and emitting a choking atmosphere of charcoal and sulphur. Piled around the walls were some fifty or a hundred small barrels with copper hoops, and branded on the heads with the word “powder.” Unmindful of the odor and the rather combustible material around him, Captain Brand again resumed his work, and rolled a large number of the little barrels toward the doorway, near the merchandise already there, saying to himself the while,
“I think that will about fill the ‘Centipede’s’ magazine, and we must make a proper disposition of the remainder.”
Hereupon Captain Brand, actively bent upon the work of disposing of his treasures, rolled out a dozen or two more of the little barrels. Strange to say, among the very few articles that were never presented to him, but actually bought of Señor Moreno, was this highly useful and indispensable material of powder, and he therefore set much store by it. And it was with a sigh of regret that the pirate stood the little barrels on their ends in a line across the great vault of the building, beneath kitchen, bedrooms, and saloon, and especially beside the square upright stanchions on which the interior of the building rested. Not content with this, he took a copper hammer and knocked in all the heads of the little barrels, and then, with 143 a scoop of the same metal, he dipped out large quantities of the black material, and poured thick trains of it from barrel to barrel, sometimes capsizing one, but always particularly cautious not to rasp a grain of it beneath his grass slippers and the pavement. Then he took a piece of match-rope, and sticking one end deep into a barrel, he just poked the other end out of a loophole, to be in readiness whenever Captain Brand should deem proper to touch his lighted cigar to it.
“There,” said Captain Brand, “that piece of tow will burn about thirty or forty minutes, and then––stand from under!”
Ascending the hatchway again with the agility of a cat, he drew up and secured the trap, and in ten minutes afterward he was freshly attired in a nice pair of India panjammers, a grass cloth jacket and vest––with, of course, the usual knickknacks in his pockets––and seated at table, where his busy housekeeper had placed a broiled chicken and a bottle of old Bordeaux before him.