So Davie gave no more heed to her family traditions and wild border tales than to her stories of witches and fairies, but just classed them all together, and when she said to him, as he was going to his daily labor on the laird's land,—
"Ah, Davie, but there's a mickle treasure hid there, and wha kens but you'll be the lucky finder?" he replied, with a laugh,—
"Nae doubt, nae doubt, a mickle treasure o' kale and potatoes, and who so likely to find it as the laird's gardener?" and then he shouldered his spade and went off whistling:
"Contented wi' little, and canty wi' mair."
But one day, long to be remembered, as he was hard at work, without a thought of grandmother and her legends, his spade struck against something hard, which proved to be the root of a tree.
"You're an auld tenant, but ye'll have to quit," quoth Davie, tugging away manfully at the offender.
It obstinately refused to yield, and, laying open the earth with his spade, he discovered that it had twined itself again and again round some object which he at first supposed to be a stone. A closer examination, however, showed that it was not a stone, but a rusty iron box!
Then the dying words of Hugh Cameron rushed to Davie's mind, and he had no difficulty in completing the sentence which death had cut short, "Under the Rowan tree in—the garden!"
That it had stood there—the only tree of its kind—in the days of the rebellion, was afterwards shown by consulting an old plan of the estate.
Davie's first impulse was to summon a witness to the spot, but remembering that the laird had gone to Edinburgh for a few days, he changed his mind, and decided to impart the secret to no one till he came back. To leave the box where it was, or anywhere else on the premises, would be the same thing as to proclaim his discovery, as the servants would be sure to find it; so he concluded to take it home and conceal it in his own barn.