“How did they get there, do you suppose ? I don’t know any more than you do; but I’ve heard tell that when those pirates buried money they left somebody to watch it. They couldn’t leave him there alive where nobody lived, and boarding-houses wasn’t to be found, and so they used to draw lots, and the feller that got the unlucky lot was just knocked in the head and laid on top of the chest before they filled up the hole. That skeleton belonged to the watchman, and it was him that knocked us around and made such noises in the air. If he ever wants anybody to say he did his duty, let him call on me and Jim—that’s all.
“We’d got out several pieces of the skeleton, and in five minutes more would have been in the chest. All at once Jim was took by the throat by one of them air ghosts, and at the same time a voice called out, ‘Leave or die.’
“Jim dropped his pick and yelled ‘murder’ as loud as he could.
LOSING THE FORTUNE.
“In less time than you could hold a red-hot nail in your eye without winking the chest sunk down out of sight and reach, the dirt rolled in on us; and if we hadn’t got out as quick as we could jump, it would have buried us. And the odd thing about it was, that the bones went in before the dirt did, and settled down jest as they were before we disturbed them. We had nothing more to do. Our fortune was gone, and it was all because Jim hadn’t put a big plaster over his mouth so as he couldn’t holler.”
Here Mr. Sanborn took another drain at the bottle, and suddenly relapsed into silence.
LXII.
OPERATIONS AT HELLGATE.