on the evening when the hon. charles barclay died, cecil mitford went out, for the first time after his terrible illness, to speak a few words in private with the negro sexton. he found the man lounging in the soft dust outside his hut, and ready enough to find a place for the corpse (which would be buried next morning, with the ordinary tropical haste), close beside the spot actually occupied by john cann's coffin. all the rest, the sexton said with a horrid grin, he would leave to cecil.
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[pg 212] 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[pg 213] 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.
