"No," he replied, "after that I know no more. After the year 1687 down to this period I know nothing further of Simon Alderly--indeed I did not even know that his name was Simon; what you tell me of incidents after that period will be new to me."
"And you will tell me all you know when I have finished?" she asked, looking at him with such trusting eyes that no man, unless he were a scoundrel, could have had one thought of obtaining her confidence and yet holding his own.
"On my honour I will," he answered, "even to telling you where I believe your wealth is hidden."
She made a gesture as though deprecating the word "your," and then, seeing he was waiting eagerly for her to continue, she did so.
"He disappeared finally in 1687--Barbara never heard of him again. Then as time went on she grew very poor. There had been a son born to them whom she had brought up to be a sailor, too, hoping thereby that, when he also became a roamer, he might somehow gather news of his father; and by turning the house into an inn, she managed to exist. In that way years passed and she began to grow old, while her son still followed the sea, though never rising to be anything more than a humble seaman. But more years after, when she was getting to be quite an old woman, her house was blown down in a hurricane--though it had survived the terrible one of 1722, when all the wharves at Port Royal were destroyed--and then--she found something."
"What?" asked Reginald. "What was it?" He remembered what David Crafer had found under circumstances not dissimilar, and, perhaps, because he was a sailor--and thereby given even in these modern days to belief in strange and mysterious things--he wondered if the hand of Fate had pointed out to that old Barbara some marvellous clue to where the treasure was. Yet he knew that it could scarce have told her of the removal of the chests of treasure from the island to the Key.
"She found," went on the Barbara of to-day, "a little walled-up wooden cupboard----"
"Great Heaven!" he muttered beneath his breath, so that, this time, she did not hear him.
"Close to the place where he used to sit and drink when at home, but of the existence of which she was ignorant. Yet, she remembered, he had often told her that there were secret hiding-places in the house, and that, if he died suddenly or never came back, she was to search diligently and she would find them. Especially he bade her search in that room; but, what with waiting and watching for his return, she had forgotten his instructions. And now that it was burst open, the wall that secured it being only a plank of wood which fell out at the first violence of the hurricane, she found this cupboard full of various pieces of money, gold and silver, and a paper in his writing telling her of his treasure in this island."
"Then it was his!" exclaimed Reginald.