Samuel Scoville

I have always been of a very treasurous disposition. Such terms as ingots, doubloons, and pieces-of-eight all my life long have been to me words of power. In spite of these tendencies, I cannot say that up to date I have unearthed much treasure. To be sure, there was that day when I found a shiny quarter in the mud on my way to school. Instead of being the out-cropping of a lode of currency, it turned out, however, to be only a sporadic, solitary, companionless coin. Even so, it was no mean find. I remember that it brought into my young life a full pound of peppermint lozenges tastefully decorated in red ink, with mottos of simple diction and exquisite sentiment. “Remember me,” and “I love but dare not tell,” were two of them, while another was a manly query unanswered across the years which read, “How about a kiss?” Although this treasure-trove gained me a fleeting popularity, yet, like all treasure, it was soon gone. A prosaic teacher confiscated the bulk of the hoard, and all I gained from it was the privilege of learning by heart a poem of the late Mr. Longfellow. To this day those beautiful lines,—

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining,—

cause in me a slight sensation of nausea.

It is probably due to these lawless traits that in my meridian years I now hold the position which I do. Five and a half days in the week I practise law. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons and all holidays, legal and illegal, I am the Captain of a Robber Band, with all the perquisites and perils which go with that high office. Without vaunting myself unduly, I may claim to have fairly deserved my position. Starting as a mere friar in the band of one Robin Hood, my abilities as an outlaw brought me rapidly to the front. Thereafter, when that band was reorganized, I was unanimously offered the position once held by that implacable character who knew the Sesame Secret and pursued a Mr. Baba so unsuccessfully, yet so unflinchingly. Flattered by this recognition of qualities of leadership unsuspected by an unthinking world, I accepted the responsibilities of the captaincy. They were shared by First-Lieutenant Trottie, Second-Lieutenant Honey, Sergeant Henny-Penny, and Corporal Alice-Palace. There were no privates.

It was on a spring evening soon after the aforesaid election that the Band met. The Captain spoke with the stern brevity which characterizes all great leaders.

“Comrades,” he announced, shutting the door and looking carefully under the sofa to make sure that there were no spies about, “I have just heard that there is a treasure not many miles from here. All those in favor of a treasure-hunt to-morrow will kindly make a loud noise.”

The vote was probably the finest collection of assorted sounds ever heard outside of a ship-yard. Right in the middle of it, the door burst open, and in rushed Minnie, the cook, with a dipper of water, under the impression that her favorite fear of fire had at last come to pass. Close behind her was the Quartermaster-General, sometimes known as Mother, while almost at the same instant old John, the gardener, ran up on the porch with an axe, shouting hopefully, “Hould him! I’m comin’!” under the impression that there was a fight of sorts well under way.

The voting stopped suddenly, and the Captain looked quite ashamed as he explained. Mother pretended to be very indignant.

“Some day,” she said, “you’ll all be in terrible danger and you’ll shout and yell and scream and bellow for help but not one of us will come, will we, John?”

“Divil a step,” called back John, as he clumped disappointedly down the steps, his unused axe over his shoulder.

The Quartermaster-General agreed to withdraw her threat only after the Captain had pledged the honor of the Band that there should be no further disgustful noises within the house. Thereafter there were hurryings and skurryings and dashings to and fro, in preparation for the great adventure. Honey put fresh rubbers on his trusty sling-shot, with which he could frequently hit a barn-door at five paces. Trottie oiled up the air-rifle, which he was only allowed to use in windowless wildernesses. Henny-Penny kept up such a fusillade with his new pop-gun, that the Captain threatened to send him forth unarmed on the morrow if he heard but one more pop. Alice-Palace’s practice, however, was the most spectacular. She had a water-pistol which, when properly charged, would propel a stream of water an unbelievable distance. From the bathroom door she took a snap-shot at Henny-Penny, who was approaching her confidingly. The charge took effect in the very centre of a large pink ear, and it was a long time before Henny-Penny could be convinced that he was not mortally wounded.

At last the Captain ordered bed and perfect silence within fifteen minutes, under penalty of being shot at sunrise.

“Nobody couldn’t shoot me at sunrise,” boasted Corporal Alice-Palace, as she started up the stairs, “cause I wouldn’t get up.”

The next morning at dawn, from the Captain’s room sounded the clear whistle of the cardinal grosbeak—the adventure-call of the Band. Followed thumps, splashings, and the sounds of rapid dressing from the third story where the Band bivouacked.

“If there be any here,” announced the Captain after breakfast, “who for the sake of their wives and families wish to draw back, now is the time. Once on the way, it will be too late.”

“I haven’t got any wife,” piped up Henny-Penny, “nor any family ‘cept this one, but I want to come.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by the rest of the Band. The Captain said that it made the blood run faster in his shriveled old veins to have such gallant comrades.

Purple grackles creaked and clattered in the trees, and the bushes were full of song-sparrow notes, as the Band hurried away from the house-line toward the Land of the Wild-Folk, where Romance still dwells and adventures lurk behind every bush. A tottering stone chimney marked its boundaries. There old Roberts Road began. On and beyond Roberts Road anything might happen.

Each one of the Band, in addition to the lethal weapons already set forth, carried a note-book and a pencil with which to keep a list of all birds seen and heard, with notes on the same. Even Corporal Alice-Palace, who was only six, carried a blank-book about the size of a geography. To date it contained this single entry: “Robbins eat wormes. I saw him do it.”

The Quartermaster-General, despite the difficulty of the evening before, had seen to it that the Band carried with them the very finest lunch that any treasure-hunters ever had since Pizarro dined with the Inca of Peru.

As they moved deep and deeper into Wild-Folk Land the air was full of bird-songs. The Captain made them stop and listen to the singing sparrows. First there was the song sparrow, who begins with three notes and wheezes a little as he sings. It took them longer to learn the quieter song of the vesper sparrow, with the flash of white in his tail-feathers. His song always starts with two dreamy, contralto notes and dies away in a spray of soprano twitterings. Then there were the silver flute-notes of the little pink-beaked field sparrow, which they were to hear later across darkling meadows, and the strange minor strains of the white-throated sparrow.

Before long, a sudden thirst came upon Sergeant Henny-Penny. Fortunately they were near the bubbling spring that marked the beginning of Fox Valley, and the whole Band halted and drank in the most advanced military manner, to wit, by bending the rims of their felt hats into a cup. This method the Captain assured them was far superior to the more usual system of lying flat on their tummies, and had the approval of all great military leaders from Gideon down.

Right in the very midst of their drinking, there sounded from the thicket a hurried warble of a mellow timbre, the wood-wind of the sparrow orchestra, and they caught a fleeting glimpse of the gray and tawny which is worn only by the fox sparrow, the largest of the sparrows and the sweetest and rarest singer of them all. A moment later a song sparrow sang. When he stopped, the strain was taken up by the fox sparrow in another key. Three times through he sang the twelve-note melody of the song sparrow, and his golden voice made the notes of the other sound pitifully thin and reedy. Then the fox sparrow threw in for good measure a few extemporaneous whistled strains of his own, and seemed to wait expectantly—but the song sparrow sang no more.

Through the long narrow valley, hidden between two green hills, marched the Band, following the hidden safe path that generations of foxes had made through the very middle of a treacherous marsh. As the road bent in toward Darby Creek, there sounded the watchman’s rattle of the first kingfisher they had heard that year; and as they came to the creek itself, a vast blue-gray bird with a long neck and bill flapped up ahead of them. It was so enormous that Alice-Palace was positive that it was a roc; but it turned out to be the great blue heron, the largest bird in Eastern America.

From the marshy fields swept great flocks of red-winged blackbirds, each one showing a yellow-bordered, crimson epaulet, proof positive that Mrs. Blackbird was still in the South. Mrs. Robin had come back the week before, which accounted for the joy-songs which sounded from every tree-top. Until she comes, the robin’s song is faint and thin and infrequent. Beyond the creek they heard the “Quick, quick, quick,” of the flicker calling to spring, and before long they came to the tree where he had hollowed his hole. A most intelligent flicker he was, too, for his shaft was sunk directly under a sign which read “No Shooting Here.”

From behind them as they marched, tolled the low sweet bell-notes of the mourning dove—“Ah—coo, coo, coo.” The Captain tried to imitate the sound, and the harassed bird stood it as long as he could, but finally flew away with whistling wings. Then the Captain told the Band of a brave mother-dove whose nest he once found on the last day of March. It was only a flat platform of dry sticks in a spruce tree, and held two pearly-white eggs. The day after he found it, there came a sudden snowstorm, and when he saw the nest again, it was covered with snow—but there was the mother-bird still brooding her dear-loved eggs, with her head just showing above the drifted whiteness.

MR. FLICKER AT HOME

Beside the ruins of a spring-house, a gray bird with a tilting tail said, “Phoe, bee-bee, bee.” It was the little phoebe, so glad to be back that he stuttered when he called his name. Thereafter the Captain was moved to relate another anecdote. It seemed a friend of his had stopped a pair of robins from nesting over a hammock hung under an apple tree, by nailing a stuffed cat right beside their bough. Whereupon the two robins, when they came the next morning, fled with loud chirps of dismay. When two phoebes started to build on his porch, he tried the same plan. He was called out of town the next day, and when he came back a week later he found that the phoebes had deserted their old nest. They had however built a new one—on top of the cat’s head.

As the Band swung back into the far end of Roberts Road, the Captain’s eye caught the gleam of a half-healed notch which he had cut in a pin-oak sapling the year before, at the top of a high bank, to mark the winter-quarters of a colony of blacksnakes. He halted the Band, and one by one they clambered up the slope, stopping puffingly at the first ledge, and searching the withered grass and gray rocks above for any black, sinister shapes. Suddenly Honey did a remarkable performance in the standing-back-broad-jump, finishing by rolling clear to the foot of the bank. Right where he had stood lay a hale and hearty specimen of a blacksnake nearly five feet long. Evidently it had only just awakened from its winter-sleep, for there were clay-smears on the smooth, satiny scales, and even a patch of clay between the golden, unwinking eyes. Only the flickering of a long, black, forked tongue showed that his snakeship was alive. Then it was that the Captain lived up to the requirements of his position by picking up that blacksnake with what he fondly believed to be an air of unconcern. He showed the awe-stricken Band that the pupil of the snake’s eye was a circle, instead of the oval which is the hallmark of that fatal family of pit-vipers to which the rattlesnake, copperhead, and moccasin belong.

“If you have any doubt about a snake,” lectured the Captain, “pick it up and look it firmly in the eye. If the pupil is oval—drop it. Perhaps, however,” he went on reflectively, “it would be better to get someone else to do the picking-up part.”

When the Band learned from the Captain that it was the creditable custom of the ZoÖlogical Gardens to give free entry to such as bore with them as a gift a snake of size, their views toward the captive changed considerably. Said snake was now legal tender, to be cherished accordingly. It was the resourceful First Lieutenant Trottie who solved all difficulties in regard to transportation. He hurriedly removed a stocking, and the snake was inserted therein, giving the stocking that knobbed, lumpy appearance usually seen in such articles only at Christmas time.

THE MOURNING DOVE ON HER NEST

From the Den the Band marched to a bowl-shaped meadow not far from old Tory Bridge, under which a Revolutionary soldier hid with his horse while his pursuers thundered overhead, well-nigh a century and a half ago. On three sides of the field the green turf sloped down to a long level stretch, covered by a thin growth of different trees, centring on a thicket through which trickled a little stream. Near the fence on a white-oak tree some ill-tempered owner had fastened a fierce sign which read: “Keep out. Trespassers will be shot without notice.” The cross owner had been gone many a long year, but the sign still stood, and it always gave the Band a delightful thrill to read it.

At the edge of the grove the Captain halted them all.

“Comrades,” he said in a whisper, “I have heard rumors that there is a clue to the treasure hidden in the sign-tree.”

It was enough. With one accord the Band sprang upon that defenceless tree. Some searched among its gnarled roots. Others examined the lower branches. It was Henny-Penny, however, who boosted by Alice-Palace, fumbled back of the threatening old sign and drew out a crumpled slip of grimy paper. On it had been laboriously inscribed in some red fluid, presumably blood, a skull and cross-bones. Underneath, in a very bad hand, was written: “By the roots of the nearest black-walnut tree. Captain Kidd.”

There was a moment’s check. It was Honey who recognized the tree by its crooked clutching twigs, and found at its roots a crumpled piece of paper which said: “Go to the nearest tulip tree. Blackbeard the Pirate.” It was Trottie who remembered that a tulip tree has square leaves, and it was he who found the message which read: “I am buried under a stone which stands between a spice-bush and a white-ash tree.” They all knew the spice-bush, with its brittle twigs and pungent bark which was made to be nibbled, and under the stone they found a note which said: “Look in the crotch of a dogwood tree. If you will listen you will hear its bark”; which made the Band laugh like anything.

The last message of all read: “I am swinging in a vireo’s nest on the branch of a sour-gum tree.” That was a puzzle which held the Band hunting like beagles in check for a long time. Corporal Alice-Palace at last spied the bleached little basket-nest at the end of a low limb. Inside was a bit of paper which, when unfolded, seemed to be entirely blank. So were the face of the Band as they looked. It was the Captain again who saved the day.

“I have heard,” he whispered, “that sometimes pirates write in lemon-juice, which makes an invisible ink that needs heat to bring it out. Like the Gold-Bug, you know.”

It was enough. In less than sixty seconds, sun time, the Band had built a tiny fire after the most approved Indian method, and as soon as it began to crackle, the paper was held as close to the blaze as possible. The Captain had the right idea. As the paper bent under the heat, on its white surface brown tracings appeared, which slowly formed letters and then words, until they could all read: “I am in the hidey-hole of the chimney of the Haunted House. The Treasure.”

For a moment the Band stared at each other in silence. They had made a special study of pirates, black, white, yellow, and mixed. Haunted houses, however, were beyond their bailiwick. It spoke well for the iron discipline and high hearts of the company that not one of them faltered. Led by dauntless Sergeant Henny-Penny, they crossed the creek in single file on a tippy tree-trunk. Half hidden in the bushes above, a gaunt stone house stared down at them out of empty window-sockets like a skull. Through the thicket and straight up the slope the Band charged, with such speed that the Captain was hard put to keep up with his gallant officers. They never halted until they stood at the threshold of the House itself. Under the bowed lintel the Band marched, and never halted until they reached the vast fireplace which took in a whole side of the room. The floorings of the House had gone, and nothing but the naked beams remained, save for a patch of warped boards far up against the stone chimney where the attic used to be. It was plainly there that they must look for the hidey-hole.

The Captain showed his followers how in one of the window-ledges the broken ends of the joists made a rude ladder. Up this the Band clambered to the first tier of joists, without any mishap save that the Captain’s hat fell off and landed in front of the fireplace.

As they all roosted like chickens on the beams, there sounded a footstep just outside. The Band stood stony still and held their breath. Through the dim doorway came the furtive figure of a man. In one hand he carried a basket, while the other was clinched on a butcher-knife well fitted for dark and desperate deeds. Although the basket seemed to be filled with dandelion greens, no one could tell what dreadful, dripping secret might be concealed underneath. For a minute the stranger looked uneasily around the shadowy room, and when his eye caught sight of the Captain’s hat, he started back and peered into every corner, while the Band stood taut and tense just over his unsuspecting head. At last, however, evidently convinced that the hat was ownerless and abandoned, he picked it up and, taking off his own battered, shapeless head-covering, started to try on the Captain’s cherished felt. Then it was that the latter acted. Bending noiselessly down until his head was hardly a foot above the unwary wanderer’s ear, he shouted in a deep, fierce, growly voice which the Band had never suspected him of having:—

“Drop that hat! Run for your life!”

The stranger obeyed both of these commands to the letter. Throwing away the hat as if it were redhot, he dashed out of the doorway and sprinted down the slope, scattering dandelion greens at every jump, and disappeared in the thicket beyond. Although the Captain laughed and laughed until he nearly fell off his beam, the rest of the Band feared the worst.

“He looked exactly like Black Dog,” murmured Honey in a low voice.

“Yes,” chimed in Trottie, “kind of slinky and tallowy.”

Whereupon, in spite of the Captain’s reassuring words, they made haste to find the Treasure, fearing lest at any moment they might hear the shrill and dreadful whistle which sounded on the night when Billy Bones died. Sidling along the beams in the wake of the Captain, they came to what remained of a crumbling staircase. One by one they passed up this until they reached the bit of attic flooring which they had seen from below. Sure enough, in one of the soft mica-schist rocks of the chimney, someone had chiseled a deep and delightful hidey-hole.

It was Lieutenant Trottie who, by virtue of his rank, first explored the unknown depths and drew therefrom a heavy, grimy canvas bag. When he undid the draw-string, a rolling mass of gold and silver nuggets rattled down on the dry boards, while the Band gasped at the sight of so much sudden wealth. A moment later a series of crunching noises showed that the treasure-hunters had discovered that said gold and silver were only thin surface foils, each concealing a luscious heart of sweet chocolate. The Captain met their inquiring glances unmoved.

“It only shows,” he explained, “what thoughtful chaps pirates have become. They knew you couldn’t use a bag of doubloons nowadays, but that sweet chocolate always comes in handy.”

Hidden treasure is not a thing to be investigated scientifically, nor can anything restore a glamour once gone. Perhaps so unconsciously reasoned the Band as they followed the Captain down the steep stairs and the steeper ladder. Through the lilac bushes he led them around to the far side of the House. There the stairway had disappeared, and most of the sagging floor-beams were broken. A limb of a nearby apple tree had thrust its way above the lilac thicket, until it nearly touched the ledge of a window half hidden by the boughs.

Up the apple tree the Captain clambered, followed by the Band, and walking out on the limb, led the way across the window-ledge into a tiny room. For some unknown reason, amid the general wreckage and ruin of the House, this room still stood untouched and with its flooring unbroken. Even the walls, plastered a deep blue, showed scarcely a crack on their surface. Best of all, fronting the open dormer of the window, was a long, deep settee, with curly, carved legs and a bent, comfortable back. Its seat was so wide that the Corporal’s legs stuck out straight in front of her when she sat down with the rest of the Band at the end of the line.

Framed in the broken sheathing and bleached stone of the window-opening, there stretched out before them a vista of little valleys and round wooded hills, all feathery green with the new leaves of early spring. The Band felt that they occupied a strong and strategic position. A drop of some twenty feet sheer from the broken flooring behind them to the ground protected them against any rear attack, and the only entrance to their refuge was so shadowed and hidden by rose-red and snow-white apple-blossoms that it would be a cunning and desperate foe indeed who could find or would storm their fastness.

With safety once secured, it was the unanimous feeling of the whole company that luncheon was the next and most pressing engagement for their consideration. An investigation of the commissary showed that the Quartermaster-General had merited promotion and decoration and citation and various other military honors, by reason of the unsurpassable quality of the rations for which she was responsible. When these were topped off by the Treasure for dessert, it was felt by the whole Band that this was a Day which thereafter would rank in their memories with Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and press hard upon the heels even of Christmas Day itself.

After a rapturous half-hour undisturbed by any desultory and unnecessary conversation, followed a chapter in the Adventures of Great-great Uncle Jake. Said relative had been a distant collateral connection of the Captain, and had fought through the Revolution, and, in the opinion of the Band, next to General Washington, had probably been most nearly responsible for the final success of the patriot arms. It was Uncle Jake who made General Putnam get off his horse into the mud and give the countersign. It was Uncle Jake who shot the Hessian who used to stand on an earthwork and make insulting gestures every morning toward the Continental camp. It was Uncle Jake again who, when he was captured, broke his way out of the Hulks, and swam ashore one stormy night. To-day the Captain had bethought himself of a rather unusual experience which Uncle Jake once had while hunting bears.

“It was during a February thaw,” he began. “Uncle Jake was coming down Pond Hill, when he stepped into a mushy place back of a patch of bushes, and sank in up to his waist. He felt something soft under his feet and stamped down hard. A second later,” continued the Captain impressively, “he wished he hadn’t. Something rose right up underneath him, and the next thing poor old Uncle Jake knew, he was astride a big black bear, going down hill like mad—riding bear-back as it were. You see,” went on the Captain hurriedly, “Uncle Jake had stepped into a bear-hole and waked up a bear by stamping on his back. He was in a bad fix. He didn’t want to stay on and he didn’t dare to get off. So what do you suppose he did?”

“Rode him up a tree,” hazarded Henny-Penny.

“No,” said the Captain. “He stuck on until they got to level ground. Then Uncle Jake drew his hunting-knife and stabbed the old bear dead right through his neck, and afterwards made an overcoat out of its skin.”

The Band felt that they could bear nothing further in the story line after this anecdote, and the Treasure having gone the way of all treasures, the march back was begun. It was the Captain who, on this homeward trip, discovered another treasure. They were passing a marshy swale of land, where a little stream trickled through a tangle of trees. From out of the thicket came an unknown bird-call. “Pip, pip, pip,” it sounded. As they peered among the bushes, on a low branch the Captain saw six strange birds, all gold and white and black, with thick, white bills. Never had the Band seen him so excited before. He told them that the strangers were none other than a company of the rare evening grosbeaks, which had come down from the far Northwest, which had never before been reported in that county, and which few bird-students ever meet in a whole lifetime, although he had found a flock in New Jersey a few months before. For long the Band stood and watched them. They flew down on the ground and began feeding on cherry-pits, cracking the stones in their great bills. At times they would fly up into a tree and sidle along the limbs like little parrots. The females had mottled black-and-white wings and gray backs and breasts, while the males had golden breasts and backs, with wings half velvet-black and half ivory-white.

For a long time they all watched the birds and made notes, until the dimming light warned them that it was time to be on their way. In the twilight the hylas called across the marshes, and from upland meadows scores of meadow-larks cried, “Swee-eet, swee-eet.” Westering down the sky sank the crescent new moon, with blazing Jupiter in her train. As the Band climbed Violet Hill and swung into the long lane which ended in home, they heard the last and loveliest bird-song of that whole dear day. Through the gathering darkness came a sweet and dreamy croon, the love-song of the little owl. Even as they listened, the distant door of the house opened and, framed in the lamp-light, waiting for them, was Mother, the best treasure of all.