"
"Well; you have heard, of course, the many stories current--the
thousand vague rumors afloat about money buried, somewhere, upon the
Atlantic coast, by Kidd and his associates. These rumors must have had
some foundation in fact. And that the rumors have existed so long and
so continuously could have resulted, it appeared to me, only from the
circumstance of the buried treasure still _remaining_ entombed. Had
Kidd concealed his plunder for a time, and afterwards reclaimed it,
the rumors would scarcely have reached us in their present unvarying
form. You will observe that the stories told are all about
money-seekers, not about money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his
money, there the affair would have dropped. It seemed to me that some
accident--say the loss of a memorandum indicating its locality--had
deprived him of the means of recovering it, and that this accident had
become known to his followers who otherwise might never have heard
that treasure had been concealed at all, and who, busying themselves
in vain, because unguided attempts to regain it had given first birth,
and then universal currency, to the reports which are now so common.
Have you ever heard of any important treasure being unearthed along
the coast?"
"Never."
"But that Kidd's accumulations were immense is well known. I took it
for granted, therefore, that the earth still held them; and you will
scarcely be surprised when I tell you that I felt a hope, nearly
amounting to certainty, that the parchment so strangely found involved
a lost record of the place of deposit.
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