"But before that one may have some pleasure still. One may gossip with the neighbours as they pass, frighten the women and the children, tell a few lies now and then, and, best of all, one may have revenge. Yes, life is worth living yet. We will live for that, you and I. You also have your little scores to pay, it would seem. How glad I am that you have come! What luck! But how did it happen that you left Nevada, Monsieur my nephew?"
"Oh, a little unpleasantness," said Pamphile, evasively. "One cannot stay always in the same place. One outlives one's usefulness. So it occurred to me that I might visit the scenes of my childhood, and when your letter came I decided to take a change and a rest, for the good of my health."
"And a little adventure as well," said Mère Tabeau, significantly. "A little expedition in search of gold, perhaps."
"Possibly," said Pamphile, with a smile, "if it could easily be done and without danger."
"Monsieur my nephew, listen to me. Directly east from this spot, through the forest and beyond the mountain, ten miles as the crow flies but twenty by the road, lies the village of Chateau Richer, where I was born many years ago--yes, more than sixty years. It was there that I passed my early years, and when I arrived at the age of love I was there still, in my little house by the shore, where I could see the bateaux pass up the river with the rising tide and pass down again with the ebb.
"Did the sailors stop sometimes on the way? Possibly. At least the smugglers came to see my brother Ovide. They were brave people, those smugglers, and rich as well. There were two who had a great treasure, obtained from the trade, in part, but chiefly from a wreck. They were wreckers too, of course. When the good God sends a storm, when a ship runs on the rocks, when all on board are drowned, does not the wreck belong to those who find it? Assuredly. So Michel Gamache and Toussaint Giroux found the wreck and the treasure on Anticosti, there below. They burned the wreck, brought the treasure home to the island, and hid it in a cave in the side of the hill by the long marsh.
"How do I know? Did I not see it on that night when Michel rowed me across the river at high tide when the moon was full. What a night it was! How bright the moon shone in the sky and in the still water beneath! How the grass rustled under the keel of the boat as we ran up into the little cove! I can hear it still. How dark it was in that cave, but how the gold coins glistened! Yes, gold coins, Napoleons, sovereigns, hundreds of them, in an iron box. Heavy? I could not lift it. Of what value? How should I know? Ten, twenty, thirty thousand pounds, perhaps. Oh, a great treasure. See, there is one of those coins, a love token which he gave me, he, Michel Gamache, and which I keep until the day of reckoning. I have a grudge against him? Yes, a little grudge, a slight affair of the heart which I have nourished for some forty years, for which I would kill him if I could be sure that he would go to the place of eternal fire."
"Well, my aunt," said Pamphile, with a yawn, "it is a fine story, but to what purpose? Was it to tell me this that you brought me from Elko?"
"But no, my nephew. Do you not know that Michel Gamache lives in this parish?"
"No."