id 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.

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 earthenware pots and pans under the lee of the sand hills and pine
woods below the Capes.

Sometimes on Sundays, when the Rev. Hillary Jones would be preaching
in the little log church back in the woods, these half-clad red s