The old fellow paused here to take another drink, and then he went on with more anecdotes about Jim Follett and his practical jokes. It was rather odd, or at any rate appeared so to his hearers, that he did not see the least impropriety in giving severe pain and annoyance to those who had offended nobody, and the thought that there was the slightest injustice in practical joking seems never to have entered his head. One of Jim’s performances, greatly relished by old Bill, was of the most inhuman character. One day Jim was on the train from Boston, and was to stop at Newburyport. There were but few passengers in the car where he rode, and near him was a woman with a baby. She was going through to Portland, and before reaching Newburyport she placed the slumbering child on the seat before her, and while watching it, fell asleep herself. On reaching Newburyport, Jim, in a spirit of mischief, took the child from the train, left it in the station, and quietly walked away. The agony of the mother on awaking may be imagined. Luckily another passenger had witnessed Jim’s performance, and by a vigorous use of the telegraph, the mother and child were brought together a few hours later, after considerable suffering on the part of both.
Suddenly Bill recollected himself, and told us about the search for Captain Kidd’s buried treasures.
THE MYSTERIOUS BOTTLE.
“One day Jim was down setting some lobster traps, and he wanted something for bait. So he went ashore, and tried to dig clams in a little cove where there was a strip of sand in between the rocks. But there wasn’t a clam to be found; and while he was a setting down, and wondering what to do next, he thought he saw something odd in the hole he had just made. He went for it, and it turned out to be the neck of a bottle; he pulled it out, and there was one of the curiousest bottles you ever see. It looked as if it might have been the bottle that Methuselah used to carry when he was a young bummer and went off on jambarees over Sunday. ‘Now,’ says Jim, ‘I’ll take this bottle home and show it to Bill Sanborn;’ and sure enough, he did. We busted it and found it empty, and I ought to have said that if there had been anything into it Jim wouldn’t never have brought it home without opening it.
“No, it wasn’t empty neither. There was a piece of paper in it, a sort of dried-up, old parchment like, with some writing on it. The writing looked as if it was done in the dark by a blind man who couldn’t read and was drunk into the bargain. We fussed over it a long time, but couldn’t make nothing out of it, and after trying a dozen times, we laid it away and went to bed.
“I fell asleep, and pretty soon I dreamed that writing all out as plain as though it had been printed. I don’t remember what it was now, but it told that there was something a hundred and twenty-three yards north-north-east, half east, from a certain rock; and I dreamed the rock out so, that I thought I should know it. Then I waked and lit a candle, and tried the paper again, and found I could read it all straight.
“I waltzed Jim out of bed in no time, and we determined to start off at daybreak. I shan’t tell you exactly where we went, and I haven’t told you the correct distance and bearings, because I want to try it again some time. Anyhow, we went there, and after a good deal of hunting we found the rock, and found a cross like a big X cut into it. Then we measured off the distance, and took the bearings with a compass we had brought along for the purpose. It turned out that a hundred and twenty-three yards north-north-east, half east, from the rock carried us beyond high-water mark; and as the tide was jest coming in, we couldn’t do nothing. We drove a stake into the sand, though, and concluded to come back and work at night when the tide was out, so as to prevent anybody seeing us. We went and slept as much as we could, and when the night tide was going out, we come back with shovels and picks and pitched in.
“You never seen fellows dig as we did. We made the dirt fly, and we only stopped once in a while to take a drink. We kept our wits about us, and didn’t speak a word, as the old folks say if you speak when you are digging for money you won’t never find it.
“A little before midnight we were down about six feet, and had a hole large enough to bury one of those dog-house trunks the women take to Nahant. I struck the pick down, and it hit something that sounded hollow. Jim almost got his mouth open to say something, but I motioned him to keep still, and put the pick down again. There was the same hollow sound, and then we went at it for dear life. We dug away and tossed out the dirt, and bimeby I hit the chest with my shovel. When I did that I felt somebody push me first one way and then the other, but I couldn’t see nobody but Jim, and he wasn’t doing it. I slid around lively, digging all the time, and Jim, too; but it was enough to make your hair turn white to be struck as we were by ghosts, and to hear the air full of noises, but couldn’t see anybody making them. They cursed us and screamed at us, but we had expected something of the sort, and besides we was after a fortune. We got some of the dirt off the chest, as it seemed to be, and with it we got some bones of a man.
THE GHOSTLY WATCHMAN.