“I wish very much to get it—it is all mine—I wish I could remember the wording of the part of the letter stolen from me. Alas, I cannot—and the half of the writing which Ichabod had, and for which I undertook so much, is now of no use to me. If Mr. Duff comes here, as you say he may, I shall ask him to give me the paper they took from my saddle-bags. I shall insist; for the writing can be of no use to him without that which goes with it.”
“Of course not,” said John, smiling at the old gentleman’s simplicity.
“But tell your story now, Mr. Hatch, if you are not too tired,” Ree urged. “Yet you must not over-estimate your strength, you know.”
“To be sure,” John quickly added, “I’ve been wanting for a long time to know about that hidden treasure, and who hid it, and what for. Why, Ree and I talked about it many times, before we knew anything more about it than was in the letter which Nesbit had—”
“It is not much of a story,” said the Quaker sadly, as John left the sentence unfinished, “but I will tell thee all I know and should have told thee long before but wished to be sure that I could trust thee.”
“That was when you thought that your half of the fortune letter was in your saddle-bags,” put in John slyly, while Ree could not but smile at the odd mixture of cupidity and simplicity which Mr. Hatch displayed, and his chum’s gentle insinuation that the Quaker would not trust them until he found his much-prized letter missing.
“Yea, verily, I thought the letter was in my saddle-bags, and watched them so closely, fearing some one would suspect my secret. I could not endure to have them out of my sight, but never once did I doubt that the paper was safely inside the little pocket I had made for it. And lo, it had been taken out far back at the Eagle tavern! Verily, it is in heaven that we should lay up golden treasure, where moth and rust cannot corrupt. But we must try to obtain the paper which was taken from me; aye, we must not fail to do that! Yet there must be no bloodshed—no fighting!”
Seeing how his chance remark had switched the Quaker from his story, John resolved to interrupt no more, nor did he. Mr. Hatch’s mind, however, was apparently so divided between the thought of his loss and the narrative he was trying to relate that his progress was tediously slow. Not once did the boys suspect, however, that he was not telling the absolute truth.
The old gentleman explained to the two friends that when he first discovered that the letter had been removed from his saddle-bags, he suspected them of taking it; but when he had told Ree that the paper was missing and the latter at once remembered the writing in the hands of Duff, Dexter and Quilling at the Eagle tavern, and the peculiar circumstances connecting Ichabod Nesbit’s name with matter, and informed him of this, he knew his young hosts were innocent, and blamed himself harshly for doubting them.
The Quaker’s story was a long one, and may be summed up substantially as follows: