By and bye, however, there was a change in the stranger's habits. He spent less time in his room and more downstairs with the rest of the company, telling them wonderful stories of the pirates in the Spanish Main. Indeed, so well did he describe the adventures that his listeners were not slow in guessing that he had himself taken a chief part in them.
One evening the talk happened to turn on the famous Captain Kidd, most celebrated of buccaneers. The Englishman was relating, as he often did, all the traditions belonging to this hero, and the stranger who liked no one to speak but himself, could hardly conceal his impatience. At length the Englishman made some allusion to a voyage of Kidd's up the Hudson river in order to bury his plunder in a secret place, and at these words the stranger could contain himself no longer.
'Kidd up the Hudson?' he exclaimed; 'Kidd was never up the Hudson.'
WOLFERT FINDS A STRANGER AT THE INN
'I tell you he was,' cried the other; 'and they say he buried a quantity of treasure in the little flat called the Devil's Hammer that runs out into the river.'
'It is a lie,' returned the stranger; 'Kidd was never up the Hudson! What the plague do you know of him and his haunts?'
'What do I know?' echoed the Englishman. 'Why, I was in London at the time of his trouble and saw him hanged.'
'Then, sir, let me tell you that you saw as pretty a fellow hanged as ever trod shoe-leather, and there was many a landlubber looking on that had better have swung in his stead.'