At twelve o'clock of a dark moonless night, Cecil Mitford, still weak
and ill, but trembling only from the remains of his fever, set out
stealthily from the dead man's low bungalow in the outskirts of Spanish
Town, and walked on alone through the unlighted, unpaved streets of the
sleeping city to the Cathedral precinct. Not a soul met or passed him on
the way through the lonely alleys; not a solitary candle burned anywhere
in a single window. He carried only a little dark lantern in his hand,
and a very small pick that he had borrowed that same afternoon from the
negro sexton. Stumbling along through the unfamiliar lanes, he saw at
last the great black mass of the gaunt ungainly Cathedral, standing out
dimly against the hardly less black abyss of night that formed the
solemn background. But Cecil Mitford was not awed by place or season; he
could think only of one subject, John Cann's treasure. He groped his way
easily through scrub and monuments to the far corner of the churchyard;
and there, close by a fresh and open grave he saw the well-remembered,
half-effaced letters that marked the mouldering upright slab as John
Cann's gravestone. Without a moment's delay, without a touch of
hesitation, without a single tinge of womanish weakness, he jumped down
boldly into the open grave and turned the light side of his little
lantern in the direction of John Cann's undesecrated coffin. A few strokes of the pick soon loosened the intervening earth
sufficiently to let him get at a wooden plank on the nearer side of the
coffin. It had mouldered away with damp and age till it was all quite
soft and pliable; and he broke through it with his hand alone, and saw
lying within a heap of huddled bones, which he knew at once for John
Cann's skeleton. Under any other circumstances, such a sight, seen in
the dead of night, with all the awesome accessories of time and place,
would have chilled and appalled Cecil Mitford's nervous blood; but he
thought nothing of it all now; his whole soul was entirely concentrated
on a single idea--the search for the missing paper. Leaning over toward
the breach he had made into John Cann's grave, he began groping about
with his right hand on the floor of the coffin. After a moment's search
his fingers came across a small rusty metal object, clasped, apparently,
in the bony hand of the skeleton. He drew it eagerly out; it was a steel
snuff-box. Prising open the corroded hinge with his pocket-knife, he
found inside a small scrap of dry paper. His fingers trembled as he held
it to the dark lantern; oh heavens, success! success! it was, it
was--the missing document! He knew it in a moment by the handwriting and the cypher! He couldn't
wait to read it till he went home to the dead man's house; so he curled
himself up cautiously in Charles Barclay's open grave, and proceeded to
decipher the crabbed manuscript as well as he was able by the lurid
light of the lantern. Yes, yes, it was all right: it told him with
minute and unmistakable detail the exact spot in the valley of the Bovey
where John Cann's treasure lay securely hidden. Not at John Cann's rocks
on the hilltop, as the local legend untruly affirmed--John Cann had not
been such an unguarded fool as to whisper to the idle gossips of Bovey
the spot where he had really buried his precious doubloons--but down in
the valley by a bend of the river, at a point that Cecil Mitford had
known well from his childhood upward. Hurrah! hurrah! the secret was
unearthed at last, and he had nothing more to do than to go home to
England and proceed to dig up John Cann's treasure! So he cautiously replaced the loose earth on the side of the grave, and
walked back, this time bold and erect, with his dark lantern openly
displayed (for it mattered little now who watched or followed him), to
dead Charles Barclay's lonely bungalow. The black servants were crooning
and wailing over their master's body, and nobody took much notice of the
white visitor. If they had, Cecil Mitford would have cared but little,
so long as he carried John Cann's last dying directions safely folded in
his leather pocket-book. Next day, Cecil Mitford stood once more as a chief mourner beside the
grave he had sat in that night so strangely by himself: and before the
week was over, he had taken his passage for England in the Royal Mail
Steamer _Tagus_, and was leaving the cocoa-nut groves of Port Royal well
behind him on the port side. Before him lay the open sea, and beyond it,
England, Ethel, and John Cann's treasure. VII. It had been a long job after all to arrange fully the needful
preliminaries for the actual search after John Cann's buried doubloons. First of all, there was Ethel's interest to pay, and a horrid story for
Cecil to concoct--all false, of course, worse luck to it--about how he
had managed to invest her poor three hundred to the best advantage. Then
there was another story to make good about three months' extra leave
from the Colonial Office. Next came the question of buying the land
where John Cann's treasure lay hidden, and this was really a matter of
very exceptional and peculiar difficulty. The owner--pig-headed
fellow!--didn't want to sell, no matter how much he was offered, because
the corner contained a clump of trees that made a specially pretty
element in the view from his dining-room windows. His dining-room
windows, forsooth! What on earth could it matter, when John Cann's
treasure was at stake, whether anything at all was visible or otherwise
from his miserable dining-room windows? Cecil was positively appalled at
the obstinacy and narrow-mindedness of the poor squireen, who could
think of nothing at all in the whole world but his own ridiculous
antiquated windows. However, in the end, by making his bid high enough,
he was able to induce this obstructive old curmudgeon to part with his
triangular little corner of land in the bend of the river. Even so,
there was the question of payment: absurd as it seemed, with all John
Cann's money almost in his hands, Cecil was obliged to worry and bother
and lie and intrigue for weeks together in order to get that paltry
little sum in hard cash for the matter of payment. Still, he raised it
in the end: raised it by inducing Ethel to sell out the remainder of her
poor small fortune, and cajoling Aunt Emily into putting her name to a
bill of sale for her few worthless bits of old-fashioned furniture. At
last, after many delays and vexatious troubles, Cecil found himself the
actual possessor of the corner of land wherein lay buried John Cann's
treasure. The very first day that Cecil Mitford could call that coveted piece of
ground his own, he could not restrain his eagerness (though he knew it
was imprudent in a land where the unjust law of treasure-trove
prevails), but he must then and there begin covertly digging under the
shadow of the three big willow trees, in the bend of the river.