The party huddled
together in a little crowd as they repaired homewards; particularly
when they passed a lonely field where a man had been murdered; and he
who had farthest to go and had to complete his journey alone, though a
veteran sexton, and accustomed, one would think to ghosts and goblins,
yet went a long way round, rather than pass by his own church-yard.
Wolfert Webber had now carried home a fresh stock of stories and
notions to ruminate upon. His mind was all of a whirl with these
freebooting tales; and then these accounts of pots of money and Spanish
treasures, buried here and there and every where about the rocks and
bays of this wild shore, made him almost dizzy.
"Blessed St. Nicholas!" ejaculated he, half aloud, "is it not possible
to come upon one of these golden hoards, and so make one's self rich in
a twinkling. How hard that I must go on, delving and delving, day in
and day out, merely to make a morsel of bread, when one lucky stroke of
a spade might enable me to ride in my carriage for the rest of my
life!"
As he turned over in his thoughts all that he had been told of the
singular adventure of the black fisherman, his imagination gave a
totally different complexion to the tale. He saw in the gang of redcaps
nothing but a crew of pirates burying their spoils, and his cupidity
was once more awakened by the possibility of at length getting on the
traces of some of this lurking wealth. Indeed, his infected fancy
tinged every thing with gold. He felt like the greedy inhabitant of
Bagdad, when his eye had been greased with the magic ointment of the
dervise, that gave him to see all the treasures of the earth. Caskets
of buried jewels, chests of ingots, bags of outlandish coins, seemed to
court him from their concealments, and supplicate him to relieve them
from their untimely graves.
On making private inquiries about the grounds said to be haunted by
father red-cap, he was more and more confirmed in his surmise. He
learned that the place had several times been visited by experienced
money-diggers, who had heard Mud Sam's story, though none of them had
met with success. On the contrary, they had always been dogged with ill
luck of some kind or other, in consequence, as Wolfert concluded, of
their not going to work at the proper time, and with the proper
ceremonials. The last attempt had been made by Cobus Quackenbos, who
dug for a whole night and met with incredible difficulty, for as fast
as he threw one shovel full of earth out of the hole, two were thrown
in by invisible hands.
