e in this terrible
bloody and murthering business?"

And so, after a good deal of argument, our hero was constrained to go;
nor did he even have an opportunity to bid adieu to his inamorata. Nor
did he see her any more, except from a distance, she standing on the
poop deck as he was rowed away from her, her face all stained with
crying. For himself, he felt that there was no more joy in life;
nevertheless, standing up in the stern of the boat, he made shift,
though with an aching heart, to deliver her a fine bow with the hat he
had borrowed from the Spanish captain, before his brother bade him sit
down again.

And so to the ending of this story, with only this to relate, that our
Master Harry, so far from going to the gallows, became in good time a
respectable and wealthy sugar merchant with an English wife and a fine
family of children, whereunto, when the mood was upon him, he has
sometimes told these adventures (and sundry others not here
recounted), as I have told them unto you.

[Illustration]

Chapter IV

TOM CHIST AND THE TREASURE BOX

_An Old-time Story of the Days of Captain Kidd_

I

To tell about Tom Chist, and how he got his name, and how he came to
be living at the little settlement of Henlopen, just inside the mouth
of the Delaware Bay, the story must begin as far back as 1686, when a
great storm swept the Atlantic coast from end to end. During the
heaviest part of the hurricane a bark went ashore on the
Hen-and-Chicken Shoals, just below Cape Henlopen and at the mouth of
the Delaware Bay, and Tom Chist was the only soul of all those on
board the ill-fated vessel who escaped alive.

This story must first be told, because it was on account of the
strange and miraculous escape that happened to him at that time that
he gained the name that was given to him.

Even as late as that time of the American colonies, the little
scattered settlement at Henlopen, made up of English, with a few Dutch
and Swedish people, was still only a spot upon the face of the great
American wilderness that spread away, with swamp and forest, no man
knew how far to the westward. That wilderness was not only full of
wild beasts, but of Indian savages, who every fall would come in
wandering tribes to spend the winter along the shores of the
fresh-water lakes below Henlopen. There for four or five months they
would live upon fish and clams and wild ducks and geese, chipping
their arrowheads, and making their earthe