Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) by Henry S. Whitehead, David Stuart Davies Read Free Book Online

the hottest part of the day among the ghosts of wine-barrels and demijohns. I stepped out into the yard to investigate.
    In a shed I found an ancient spade and, best of all, a thing like a mattock which might have been dug up on the site of Persepolis. These I carried down into the dim, cool cellar. With the spade I knocked loose the hooks of a hurricane shutter. That would dissipate the slight, musty smell and also provide a better light for me that afternoon.
    Esmerelda was still bargaining among the bebustled vendors in the market when I returned upstairs to wash by hands.
    After lunch I waited until I heard Esmerelda leave. I watched the good soul as she walked down the hill, through slanted jalousies. And when she passed out of sight around the corner by St Paul’s Church, I locked the front door and descended into the cellar. It was fairly cool and hardly musty at all. I hung my coat on an ancient, hand-wrought nail and set to work.
    The hard-pounded earth came away reluctantly as I picked at it. loosening the surface for a hole about six feet square. Alternately with this I shoveled out the loose dirt, placing it well to one side, so that it would not run back.
    It was two when I began. The fort clock had chimed three-thirty a few minutes before I struck something metallic. It took me at least fifteen minutes more before I had uncovered a small iron trunk in the corner of the large square I had opened.
    I broke the rusty lock with the edge of the spade, raised it, and there before me – and such is human nature that I must say I was more surprised than amazed, at the very first – lay, neatly stacked in rouleaus from which the ancient cotton cloth fell away in shreds and flakes, row after row of gold coin – all the coinage of romance: doubloons, of course; ancient American eagles; Louis d’Or; even a few East Indian Mohurs!
    In a side compartment by themselves lay, carefully packed in, an assortment of jeweled implements, jeweled chalices and patens from the loot, doubtless, of those rich Spanish Churches of Central and South American seaside cities, perhaps even from Porto Rico and Santo Domingo; jewelry, much of it monogrammed; gold plate such as had graced the hospitable boards of many a fabulously rich sugar baron of the islands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
    At the very bottom of this separate compartment, which was of the capacity of about one-third the trunk’s cubical contents, lay, flattened and stiff, a sack of oiled silk. I picked it up and had to untie the leather pouch-strings, so well was it preserved.
    I looked in and then thrust in my right hand, and even in the comparatively dim light of the old cellar there leaped out at me the myriad coruscations of cut jewels, throwing back the light they had not known for fully a century. My hand was full of jewels, and I had hardly taken off the edge – the very topmost.
    Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, blazing emeralds. A king’s, an emperor’s ransom here, in the cellar of Melbourne House.
    The pirate! He had not misled us. What, in God’s name, did it mean!
    Well, I had other things to think of besides mooning over that problem there in the cellar, with a fair-sized fortune held in my hand and God knows how much else there in the iron trunk – gold, vessels, jewels.
    I spent the next half-hour carrying the trunk’s contents up to my bedroom in the wholly unromantic iron pail in which Esmerelda boils the drinking water. I deposited them all, in a kind of order – gold coin all together, vessels and jewels separate – in two bureau drawers, turning out shirts and collars for this accommodation.
    I locked the drawers, stuffed the shirts into the mahogany wardrobe, placed the bureau key in my pocket and returned to the cellar. There, by leaving open the old trunk’s lid, I was able in another half-hour of feverish work, which left me literally dripping and soaking, to get back and roughly to pound down all the dry earth I had taken