In a few minutes he was back, with a coil of good-sized rope.
Taking an end of this, Ben again crawled into the opening and made the rope tight about the chest. Then the three boys took hold of the other end of the rope and began to pull. The sand was not very secure footing and the chest was heavy, but gradually they pulled it out. They discovered it was a box made of hard wood, with iron fastenings.
“Well,” declared Tom, “if James Sampson carried that all the way here by himself, all I’ve got to say is that he deserves his name.”
“These mahogany men,” added David, “supposing that the fellow who carried this chest was a mahogany man—must belong to a race of giants. I wonder if it was a mahogany man who made those footprints on the edge of the creek?”
Ben had picked up a flat stone, shaped something like a large Indian arrowhead, and another round stone; and inserting the first stone under the lid of the chest, he struck it several blows with the other.
Tom watched him a moment. “You can’t pry it open that way,” he asserted. Looking along the beach, he selected a big, egg-shaped stone and brought it back to the chest. Lifting it in both hands, he dropped it on the iron band just above the lock. The iron snapped apart. The stone bounced off on the sand.
David and Ben seized the lid. With a creaking of hinges it was lifted. There before them was a light blue coat, gold-braided, a three-cornered hat of felt, a sword in a tarnished scabbard.
“My eye!” exclaimed Tom. “Just clothes! Why in the world did he want to hide such things?”
Ben was flinging them aside. Underneath were other garments, several suits of the style worn by gentlemen in Revolutionary days, and then the oddest collection of bric-a-brac, candlesticks, pewter pitchers, a silver snuff-box, a couple of lacquered platters, and even some china plates.
David started to laugh. “Well, if that’s the Cotterell treasure, I can’t give it much! I don’t see why the Barmouth people wanted to lay hands on it, or why Sir Peter and his precious James Sampson were so eager to get away with it. Why, it’s regular junk-shop stuff. I don’t suppose the whole collection, if they’d sold it at auction, would have fetched enough to feed a soldier a week.”