LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE OF
LITEZPA TURE, SCIENCE AA/'D ED UCA TIOJV.
JANUARY, 1868. DALLAS
GALBRAITH. no one can tell in the quietest summer day, on land, what storm or disaster is hid in that womb of death yonder. On shore, the mellow October sunset was shining pleasantly on the white beach, up to which the yellow, fishy little schooner was hauled close, and on the men in their red shirts: the raw wind was tempered to a bracing breeze. and the waves lapped the sand and the
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CHAPTER I.
“
ELL him that it was on this coast that the ship went down. Let him send me warranty, and I can find the treasure hidden among these rocks.” The two or three fishermen who were loading the schooner prieked up their ears: there was a secret under current of meaning in the deliberately worded message, perceptible to every one of them ; some obscure, mysterious significance which seemed suddenly to oddly set apart the words and the man that spoke them from themselves and their everyday work. They looked up from the barrels they were lifting, turn ing perplexed faces out to the great plane of the sea, or along the desolate coast, and then glanced shrewdly at each other: they joked about it when they went under the hatches, out of his hear
ing; but the jokes had but little relish in them,'and fell dead ; and the men went on with their work after that in silence,
chewing the cud of the matter, as is their habit. It was a colorless, threatening even ing out at sea; a nipping gust driving
the few white sails in sight, like shiver ing ghosts, across the horizon that barred the east like a leaden wall; the masses of water moving towards shore, slow,
sombre, dumb.
But this was only the
keel of the vessel, with a tamed, sleepy purr. The marshes, because of the heavy rains that year, still held their summer coloring, and unrolled from the strip of beach up to the pine woods a great boundary belt of that curious, clear emerald that belongs only to the sea and seashore growths. Beyond this belt, two or three comfortable brown cows were grazing at the edge of the forest, and, here and there, in the forest, a whiff of smoke wavering to the sky, or a good-bye red glimmer of the sun on a low window, told where the houses of the village were scattered. If village it could be called. About a mile from the schooner, and the little buzz of life about her, rose one of the two great headlands well known to all mari ners : they jut out into the sea as though they were grim, warning sentinels over this terrible coast of sunken breakers and whitening bones. A sharp ridge
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Clerk's Otfice of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Von. I.—z 9
