low doorway with my lantern, and looked around. Yes! indeed,
man had certainly been here, man, too, very purposeful and businesslike.
I was in a sort of low narrow gallery, some forty feet long, to which
the arching rock made a crypt-like ceiling. At my first glance, I saw
that there was another door at the far end similar to the one I had
entered by; and on the left side of the gallery, built of rough stones
from the low ceiling to the floor, was a series of compartments, each
with locked wooden door. They were strong and grim looking, and might
have been taken for prison cells, or family vaults, or possibly
wine-bins. The massive locks were red with rust, and there was plainly
no possibility of my opening them.

On the other side of the gallery there was a litter of old chains, and
some boards, probably left over from the doors. Yes! and there were two
old flintlock guns, and several cutlasses, all eaten away with rust,
also a rough seaman's chest open and falling to pieces. At the sight of
that, a wild thought flashed through my brain. What if--Good God!--What
if this was John Teach's treasury!--behind those grim doors. I threw
myself with all my force against one and then the other. For the moment
I forgot that my paramount business was to escape. But I might as well
have hurled myself against the solid rock. And, at that moment, I
noticed that the place was darker than it had been. My lantern was going
out. In a moment or two, I should be in the pitch dark, and I had
discovered that the door at the end of the gallery was as solid as the
others.

I was to be trapped, after all; and I pictured myself slowly dying there
of hunger--the pangs of which I was already beginning to feel--and some
one, years hence, finding me there, a mouldering skeleton--some one who
would break open those doors, uncover those gleaming hoards, and
moralise on the irony of my end; condemned to die there of starvation,
with the treasure I had so long sought on the other side of those
unyielding doors. Old Tom's words suddenly flashed over me, and I could
feel my hair literally beginning to rise. "There never was a buried
treasure yet that didn't claim its victim." Great God!--and I was to be
the ghost, and keep guard in this terrible tomb till the next dead man
came along to relieve me of my sentry duty!

Frantically I turned up the wick of my lantern at the thought--but it
was no use; it was plainly going out. I examined my match-box; I ha