Then he stopped all of a sudden, and, scrambling to his feet, fell to gathering up the money as though he had been crazy.
For an hour or more they hunted up and down, picking up silver pieces as children pick up chestnuts under a chestnut tree. After a while they only found a few stray coins here and there, and finally they cleared the beach of them altogether. Then they sat down to count them. Tom had about two hundred dollars; Jack had gathered more nearly three hundred than two. Altogether they had a little less than five hundred dollars between them.
“Where do you suppose they came from, Tom?” said Jack, after a while. He was sitting on the sand when he spoke, holding a lot of the coins in his hand and turning them over with his fingers.
Tom shook his head. This was the same thought that had been puzzling him for some time past, and, as yet, he had not been able to answer it.
After a while they went back to their hut, carrying their money with them. Jack was very talkative and excited, but Tom was as silent as the other was noisy, for he was pondering over the matter of Jack’s question—Where did they all come from?
Where did they all come from? He thought and thought till his brain was muddled with his thinking. Could there have been a treasure buried here by the buccaneers in times past? It was a wild thought, but Tom was ready for any kind of wild thought at the time. But then the date of the coin that he had found—1792—that was long after the time of the buccaneers. He picked up another piece and looked at it; it also bore the same date, 1792, and so did another and another; they were all of the same mintage. He did not know what to think of it.
Jack must have had a notion that Tom was puzzling his wits over this, for he sat beside the fire all of the evening without saying a word. Every now and then he arose and threw some more brushwood on the flames; beyond that he hardly moved, but sat in silence, watching Tom furtively.
“Tom,” said he, at last.
“Well, Jack.”
“Do you suppose that it could rain money?”