“And some of this money was gold, I think I heard you say. A stocking pretty well filled with gold and silver.”
“The foot was cramming full, when I saw it, and that wasn’t three months since. I can’t say there was any great matter in the leg. Yes, there was gold in it, too. She showed me the stocking the last time I saw it, on purpose to ask me what might be the valie of a piece of gold that was almost as big as half a dollar.”
“Should you know that piece of gold, were you to see it, again?”
“That I should. I didn’t know its name, or its valie, for I never seed so big a piece afore, but I told Miss Goodwin I thought it must be ra’al Californy. Them’s about now, they tell me, and I hope poor folks will come in for their share. Old as I am—that is, not so very old neither—but such as I am, I never had a piece of gold in my life.”
“You cannot tell, then, the name of this particular coin?”
“I couldn’t; if I was to have it for the telling, I couldn’t. It wasn’t a five dollar piece; that I know, for the old lady had a good many of them, and this was much larger, and yellower, too; better gold, I conclude.”
The coroner was accustomed to garrulous, sight-seeing females, and knew how to humour them.
“Where did Mrs. Goodwin keep her specie?” he enquired. “If you saw her put the stocking away, you must know its usual place of deposit.”
“In her chest of drawers,” answered the woman eagerly. “That very chest of drawers which was got out of the house, as sound as the day it went into it, and has been brought down into the village for safe keeping.”
All this was so, and measures were taken to push the investigation further, and in that direction. Three or four young men, willing volunteers in such a cause, brought the bureau into the court-room, and the coroner directed that each of the drawers should be publicly opened, in the presence of the jurors. The widow was first sworn, however, and testified regularly to the matter of the stocking, the money, and the place of usual deposit.