The old stories add, moreover,
that the devil presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under
his guardianship; but this, it is well-known, he always does with
buried treasure, particularly when it has been ill gotten. Be that as
it may, Kidd never returned to recover his wealth; being shortly after
seized at Boston, sent out to England, and there hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were prevalent
in New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees,
there lived near this place a meagre miserly fellow of the name of Tom
Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that
they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay
hands on she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert
to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying about to
detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that
took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in
a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone and had an air of starvation.
A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no
smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A
miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a
gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely
covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his
hunger; and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, looked
piteously at the passer-by, and seem to petition deliverance from this
land of famine.
The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a
tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm.
Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his
face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to
words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them; the lonely
wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamor and
clapper-clawing; eyed the den of discord askance, and hurried on his
way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood,
he took what he considered a short cut homewards through the swamp.
Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly
grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet
high; which made it dark at noon-day, and a retreat for all the owls of
the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered
with weeds and mosses; where the green surface often betrayed the
traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and
stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the
water-snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned,
half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous
forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded
precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a
cat, among the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the
sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising
on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a piece of
firm ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the
swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during their
wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of fort
which they had looked upon as almost impregnable, and had used as a
place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained of the
Indian fort but a few embankments gradually sinking to the level of the
surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks and other
forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the dark pines
and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the old
fort, and he paused there for a while to rest himself. Any one but he
would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place,
for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed
down from the time of the Indian wars; when it was asserted that the
savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit.
Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the
kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock,
listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving with his
walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he turned up
the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He
raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull with an
Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on the
weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this death blow had been
given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had taken
place in this last foothold of the Indian warriors.
"Humph!" said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake the dirt
from it.
"Let that skull alone!" said a gruff voice.
Tom lifted up his eyes and beheld a great black man, seated directly
Opposite him on the stump of a tree.
