ent into the hills in search of the tree. After much toil I found it.
When I came home at night my valet proposed to give me a flogging. With
the rest of the adventure I believe you are as well acquainted as
myself."

"I suppose," said I, "you missed the spot, in the first attempt at
digging, through Jupiter's stupidity in letting the bug fall through the
right instead of through the left eye of the skull."

"Precisely. This mistake made a difference of about two inches and a
half in the 'shot'--that is to say, in the position of the peg nearest
the tree; and had the treasure been _beneath_ the 'shot' the error would
have been of little moment; but the 'shot,' together with the nearest
point of the tree, were merely two points for the establishment of a
line of direction; of course the error, however trivial in the
beginning, increased as we proceeded with the line, and, by the time we
had gone fifty feet, threw us quite off the scent. But for my
deep-seated convictions that treasure was here somewhere actually
buried, we might have had all our labor in vain."

"I presume the fancy of _the skull_--of letting fall a bullet through
the skull's eye--was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag. No doubt
he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through
this ominous insignium."

"Perhaps so; still, I cannot help thinking that common-sense had quite
as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency. To be visible
from the Devil's seat, it was necessary that the object, if small,
should be _white_; and there is nothing like your human skull for
retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all
vicissitudes of weather."

"But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle--how
excessively odd! I was sure you were mad. And why did you insist on
letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?"

"Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions
touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own
way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the
beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation
of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea."

"Yes, I perceive; and now there is only one point which puzzles me. What
are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?"

"That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself. There
seems, however, only one plausib