become aware of the death's-head, and so
never the possessor of the treasure?"

"But proceed, I am all impatience."

"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 some
foundation in fact. And that the rumors have existed so long and so
continuous, 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 afterward 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."

"But how did you proceed?"

"I held the vellum again to the fire, after increasing the heat, but
nothing appeared. I now thought it possible that the coating of dirt
might have something to do with the failure; so I carefully rinsed the
parchment by pouring warm water over it, and having done this, I placed
it in a tin pan, with the skull downward, and put the pan upon a furnace
of lighted charcoal. In a few minutes, the pan having become thoroughly
heated, I removed the slip, and to my inexpressible joy, found it
spotted in several places, with what appeared to be figures arranged in
lines. Again I placed it in the pan, and suffered it to remain another
minute. Upon taking it off, the whole was just as you see it now."

Here Legrand, having re-heated the parch