paused.

"You won't?" he asked, gulping down his own portion; and the liquor
must have been potent, for it brought a sudden water to his eyes.
"Well, so be it--if you've kept off it at your age. But at mine"--
he drank off the second glassful and wiped his mouth--"I've had
experiences, Brooks. When you've heard 'em, you wouldn't be
surprised, not if it took a dozen to steady me."

He filled again, and came close to me, holding the glass, yet so
tremulously that the rum spilled over his fingers.

"Ingots, lad--golden ingots! Bars and wedges of solid gold!
Gems, too, and cath-e-deral plate, with crucifixions and priests'
vestments stiff with pearls and rubies as if they was frozen.
I've seen 'em lyin' tossed in a heap like mullet in a ground-net.
Ay, and blazin' on the beach, with the gulls screamin' over 'em and
flappin', and the sea all around. I seen it with these eyes, boy" He
stood back and shivered. "And behind o' that, the Death! But it
comes equal to all, the Death. Not if a man had learned every trick
the devil can teach could he lay his course clear o' that. Could he,
now?"

His words, his uncouth gestures, which were almost spasms, and the
changes in his face--from cupidity to terror, and from terror again
to a kind of wistful hope--fairly frightened me, and I stammered
stupidly that death was the common lot, and there couldn't be a doubt
of it; that or something of the sort. But what I said does not
matter. He was not listening, and before I had done he drained and
set down the glass and gripped my arm again.

"I seen all that--ay, an' felt it!" He drew away and stretched out
both hands, crooking his fingers like talons. "Ay, an' I seen
_him!_"

"Him?" I echoed. "But you were talking of Death, sir."

"You may call him that. There's men lyin' around in the sand--
Did ever you hear, boy, of a poison that kills a man and keeps him
fresh as paint?"

"No, sir."

He nodded. "No, I reckon you never did. Fresh as paint it keeps
'em, and white as a figure-head. The first heap as ever I dug,
believin' it to be the treasure--my reckoning was out by a foot or
two--I came on one o' them. Three foot beneath the sand I came on
him, an' the gulls sheevoing all the while over my head. _They_
knew. And the sea and the dreadful loneliness around us all the
while. There was three of us, Brooks--I mention no names, you
understand--three of us, and _him_. Three to one. Yet he got the
better of