.

Parson Jones held up both hands into the air, and Tom stared at what
he saw, wondering whether it was all so, and whether he was really
awake. It seemed to him as though he was in a dream.

There were two-and-twenty bags in all in the chest: ten of them full
of silver money, eight of them full of gold money, three of them full
of gold dust, and one small bag with jewels wrapped up in wad cotton
and paper.

"'Tis enough," cried out Parson Jones, "to make us both rich men as
long as we live."

The burning summer sun, though sloping in the sky, beat down upon them
as hot as fire; but neither of them noticed it. Neither did they
notice hunger nor thirst nor fatigue, but sat there as though in a
trance, with the bags of money scattered on the sand around them, a
great pile of money heaped upon the coat, and the open chest beside
them. It was an hour of sundown before Parson Jones had begun fairly
to examine the books and papers in the chest.

Of the three books, two were evidently log books of the pirates who
had been lying off the mouth of the Delaware Bay all this time. The
other book was written in Spanish, and was evidently the log book of
some captured prize.

It was then, sitting there upon the sand, the good old gentleman
reading in his high, cracking voice, that they first learned from the
bloody records in those two books who it was who had been lying inside
the Cape all this time, and that it was the famous Captain Kidd. Every
now and then the reverend gentleman would stop to exclaim, "Oh, the
bloody wretch!" or, "Oh, the desperate, cruel villains!" and then
would go on reading again a scrap here and a scrap there.

And all the while Tom Chist sat and listened, every now and then
reaching out furtively and touching the heap of money still lying upon
the coat.

One might be inclined to wonder why Captain Kidd had kept those bloody
records. He had probably laid them away because they so incriminated
many of the great people of the colony of New York that, with the
books in evidence, it would have been impossible to bring the pirate
to justice without dragging a dozen or more fine gentlemen into the
dock along with him. If he could have kept them in his own possession
they would doubtless have been a great weapon of defense to protect
him from the gallows. Indeed, when Captain Kidd was finally brought to
conviction and hung, he was not accused of his piracies, but of
striking a mutinous seaman upon the h