{ title: 'South New Berlin bee. (South New Berlin, Chenango County, N.Y.) 1897-1965, October 04, 1919, Page 8, Image 8', download_links: [ { link: 'http://www.loc.gov/rss/ndnp/ndnp.xml', label: 'application/rss+xml', meta: 'News about NYS Historic Newspapers - RSS Feed', }, { link: '/lccn/sn92061740/1919-10-04/ed-1/seq-8/png/', label: 'image/png', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/sn92061740/1919-10-04/ed-1/seq-8.pdf', label: 'application/pdf', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/sn92061740/1919-10-04/ed-1/seq-8/ocr.xml', label: 'application/xml', meta: '', }, { link: '/lccn/sn92061740/1919-10-04/ed-1/seq-8/ocr.txt', label: 'text/plain', meta: '', }, ] }
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SOUTH NEW BERLIN BEE. PIECE EienTcp 3 THEBEING AUTHENTICHE NARRATIVEHENTIC ORRATIVE f V — T AUT NA TREASURE DISCOVERED IN THE BAHAM, GIVEN TO THE PUBUC CaPy7?/G/nr G Y 0 0 2 /8 l£ m X /Y G £ f ^ C 0 /V /^ A SHAPE OF WITCHCRAFT. Synopsis—The man who toils this etory—call him the hero, for short— is visitingr his friend, John Saun ders, British official in Nassau, Bahama islands. Charles Webster, a local merchant, completes the trio of friends. Saunders produces a written document purporting: to bo the death-bed statement of Hen ry P. Tobia spoxs wnere twh millions av of treasure were buried by him and his companions; ^he conversation of the 'hree friends is overheard by a pock-marked stranger, *The docu ment disappears. Saunders, how- _>y. The hero, detM'- seek the buried trea charters a schooner. The l marked man is taken on as a senger. On the voyage somebody empties the gasoline tank. The hero and the passenger clash, the pas senger leaving a manifesto bearing the signature, “Henry P. Tobias, Jr.“ The hero lands ^ Shoes. There is a fight, whic lis. The mtaining the IS of ■ chest—empty save for a few meces of eight scattered on the isappears. over, has a cop: mined to ( 'he hero lands on Dead Men's Shoes. There is a fight, which^ is followed, by seii«ral funerals, hero finds a cave containin_ skeletons of two pirates and a m a s- chest—empty save for a fe meces of eight scattered on t bottom. The hero returns to Nas sau and by good luck learns the location of Short Shrift island. Webster buys the yawl Flamingo, and he and the hero sail for Snort Shrift Island. As the Flamingo leaves the wharf a young fellow, “Jark Harkaway,” jumps aboard and is allowed to remain. Jack proves an Interesting and mysteri ous passenger. Tne adventurers capture Tobias. \Jack Harkaway\ iwroves to be a girl and disappears.\ The hero sails to Short Shrift is land, sees an entrancing girl with a Spanish dubloon. CHAPTER I—Continued. ' » My presence seemed at once to pnt her on her guard. The music of her voice was suddenly hushed, as though jshe had hurriedly, almost in terror, thrown a robe of reticence about an Impulsive naturalness not to be dis played before strangers. As for the storekeeper, he was evidently a fa miliar aeanaintance. He had known her—^he said after she was gone— Bfnce she was a little girl. While he spoke, my eyes had acci dentally fallen oa the coin still in his band, with which she had just paid bim. “Why,” I said, “this is a Spanish doubloon!” “That’s what it is.” said the English man laconically. “But doesn’t it strike you as strange that she should pay her bills with Spanish doubloons?” I asked. “It did at first,” he answered; and then, as if annoyed with himself, he was attempting to retrieve an expres sion that carried an implication he evi dently didn’t wish me to retain, he added: “Of course, she doesn’t always pay in Spanish doubloons. I suppose they have a few old coins in the fam ily and use them when they run out of others.” It was as lame an explanation as well could be, and no one could doubt that, whatever his reason for so doing, he was lying. “But haven’t you trouble in dispos ing of them?” I inquired. “Gold is always gold,” he answered, “and we don’t see enbngh of it here to be particular as to whose head is stamped upon it, or what date. Be sides, as I said, it isn’t as if I got many of them; and you can always dispose of them as curiosities.” “Will you sell me this one?” I a ^ ed. , “I see no harm in your having it,” he lliaid, “but I’d just as soon you didn’t mention where you got it.” “Certainly,” I answered, disguising my wonder at his secretiveness. “What Is it worth?” He named the sum of sixteen dol lars and seventy-five cents. Having paid him that amount I bade him good-night, glad to be alone wifli my eager, glowing thoughts. These I took wHh me f(> n bit of coral beach, made doubly white by the moon, rustled over by giant palms, and whispered to by the vast living jewel of the sea. I took out my strange dOFUbloon and fleshed i t in the moon. But, brightly as it shone, it hardly seemed as bright as it would have seemed a short while back; or, per haps, it were truer to say that in an other, newer aspect it shone a hun dred times more brightly. The adven ture to which it called me was no longer single and simple as before, but a gloriously confused goal of . cloudy splendors, the burning core qt which —suddenly raying out, act then lost again in brightnesa-r-were the eyes of « mysterioxss girl. C H A r reR II. Under the Influence of the Moon. My days now began to drift rather aimlessly, as without apparent pur pose I continued to linger on an. Island that might wefi seem to have Uttle attraction to a strsiD^Ar—how little I •ould hr -#jrsUfieatio» of the good Tom, to whom, for once, of course, I could not confide. Yet I had a vague purpose; or, a t least, I had a •feeling that, if I waited on something would develop in the direction of miy hopes. The doubloon still suggested that it was the key to a door of fas cinating mystery to which chance might at any moment direct me. And—^why not admit it?—apart from my burled treasure, to the possible discovery of which the doubloon seemed to point, I was possessed with a growing desire for another glimpse of those haunting eyes. They needed not their association with the mys terious gold, they were magnetic enough to draw any man, with even the rudiments of imagination, along the path of the unknown. All the paths out of the little settlement were paths Into the unknown, and, day after day, I followed one or another of them out into the wilderness, taking a gun with me, as an ostensible excuse for any spying eye, and bringing back with me occasional bags of the wild pigeons which were plentiful on the island. One day I had thus wandered unus ually far afield, and a t nightfall found myself still several miles from home on a rocky path overhanging the sea. There was no sign of habitation any where. It was a wild and lonely place, and presently over its savage beauty stole the glamor of the moon rising f ar over the sea. I sat down on a ledge of the clifls and watched the moon light grow in intensity as the darkness of the woods deepened behind me. It was a night full of witchcraft; a night on which the stars, the moon, and the sea together seemed hinting at some wonderful thing about to happen. Then, as if the fairy night were matching my thoughts with a chal lenge, what was this bright wonder suddenly present on one of the boul ders far down beneath me?—a tall shape of witchcraft whiteness, stand ing, full in the moon, like a statue in luminous marble of some goddess of antiquity. My eyes and my heaft together told me it was she; and, as she hung poised over the edge of the water in the at titude of one about to dive, a turn of her bead gave me that longed-for glimpse of those living eyes filled with moonlight. She stood another mo ment, still as the night, in her loveli ness ; and the next she had dived di rectly into the path of the moon. I saw her eyes moonfilled again, as she came to the surface, and. began to swim—^not, as one might have expect ed, out from the land, but directly in toward the unseen base of the cliffs. The moon-path did lead to a golden door in the rocks, I said to myself, and she was about to enter it. It was a secret door known only to herself; and then, for the first time that night, I thought of that doubloon. Perhaps If I had not thought of It I should not have done what then I did. There will, doubtless, be those who will censure me. If so, I am'afraid they must. At all events, it was the thought of that doubloon that swayed the balance of my hesitation in taking the moon-path in the track of that bright apparition. I looked for a way down to the edge of the sea. It was not easy to find, but after much perilous scrambling I at length found myself on the boulder which had so lately been the pedestal of that Badiance; and, in another mo ment. I had dived into the moon-path and was swimming toward the mys terious golden door. Before me the rocks opened in a deep narrow crevasse, a long rift, evi dently slashing back into the cliff, be neath the road on which I had been treading. I could see the moonlit water vanishing into a sort of gleam ing lane between the vast overhang ing walls. Presently I felt my feet rest lightly on firm sand, and, still shoulder deep in the water, I walked on another yard or two—to be brought to a sudden stop. There she was coming toward me, breast high in that watery tunnel! The moon, continuing its serene ascen sion, lit her up with a sudden beam, o r shape of bloom and glory! For a moment we both stood looking at each other, as if transfixed. Then she gave a frightened cry and put her hands up to her bosom ; as she did so a stream of something bright—like %old pieces—fell from her mouth, and two like streams from her opened hands. Then, ns quick as light, she had darted past me and dived into the moon-path beyond. She must have swam under the water a long way, for when I saw her dark head rise again in the glimmering path it was at a distance of many yards. I had no thought of following her, but stood in a dream among the wa tery gleams and echoes. For me had come that hour of won der; for me put of that tropic sea, into whose flawless deeps my eyes had so Owen gone adream, had risen the crea ture of miracle. O ! shape of moonlit marble ! O ! holiness of this night of moon and stars and seal Yes 11 was in love. Yet I hope, and think, that the reader will not resent this unexpected incursion into the realms of sentiment when he consid ers that my sudden attack was not, like most such sudden attacks, an in terruption in the robuster coiifse of events, but, instead, curiously in the direct line of my purpose. Because the eyes of an unknown girl had thus suddenly enthralled me, I was not, therefore, to lose sight of that purpose. On the contrary, they had suddenly shone out on the pathway along which I had been blindly groping. But for the accident of being in the dirty little store at so psychological a moment, hearing that strangely familiar voice and catching sight erf that mysterious doubloon as well as those mysterious eyes, I should, have set sail that very night and given up John P. Tobias’ second treasure in final disgust. As it was, I was now warmly on the track of some treasure—^whether his or not —^with two bright eyes further to point the way. Never surely did a man’s love and his purpose make so practical a combination. When I reached my lodging at last in the early morning following that night of wonders my eyes and heart were not so dazed with that vision in the cave that I did not vividly recall one important detail of the strange picture—those streams of gold that had suddenly pooired out of the mouth and hands of the lovely apparition. Without doubting the evidence of my senses, I was forced to believe that, by the oddest piece of luck, I had stumbled upon the hiding place of that hoard of doubloons, on which my fair unknown drew from time to time as she would out of a bank. But who was she?—and where was her home? There had seemed no sign of habitation near the wild place where I had come upon her, though, of course, a solitary house might easily have escaped my notice hidden among all that foliage, particularly at night- faU. To be sure, I had but to inquire of the storekeeper to leam all I wanted; but I was averse from betraying my- interest to him or to anyone in the settlement—^for, after all, it was my own affair, and hers. So I determined to pursue my policy of watching-and waiting, letting a day or two elapse before I again went out wandering with my gun. I left the craggy bluff facing the sea and plunged into the woods. I had no idea how dark it was going to, but, coming out of the sun, I was at once bewildered by the deep and com plicated gloom of massed branches overhead, and the denser darkness of shrubs and vines so intricately inter woven as almost to make a solid wall She Had Dived Oirectiy Into the Path of the Moon. about one. Then the atmosphere was so close and airless that a fear of suf focation combined at once with the other fear of being swallowed up in all this savage green life, without hope of finding one’s way out again into the sun. I fought my way in but a very few yards when both these fears clutched hold of me with a sudden hor ror, and the perspiration poured from me; I could no longer distinguish be tween the way I had come and any other part of the wood! Indeed, there was no way anywhere! I must have battled through the veritable inferno of vegetation for at least an hour—^though it seemed a life time. Clouds of particularly unpleas ant midges filled my eyes, not to speak of mosquitoes and a peculiar kind of persistent stinging fly was adding to my miseries, when a t last, begrimed and dripping with sweat, I stumbled out, with a cry of thankfulness, on to comparatively fresh air and some thing like a broad avenue running north and south through the wood. It was indeed densely overgrown, and had evidently not been used for many years. Still, it was comparatively* passable, and one could at least see the sky and take long breaths once more. Still there was no sign of a house anywhere. Presently, however, as I stumbled along I noticed something looming darkly through the matted forest on my left that suggested walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone cottage, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub. And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and MU another—all, as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes, at low tide, one can dis cern the walls of a ruined village at the bottom of the sea. Evidently I had come upon a long* abandoned settlement, and presently, on some slightly higgler ground to the left, I thought I could make out the half-submerged walls of a much more ambitious edifice. liooking closer, noted, with a thriji of surprise, the beginning of a very narrow path, not more than a foot wide; leading up through the ‘ scrub in its direction. Narrow as it was, it had clearly been kept open by the not-infrequent pas sage of feet. With a certain eerie feel ing, I edged my way into It, and, aft«» following it for a hundred yards or so^ found-myself close to the roofless ruin of a spacious stone house with some thing of the appearance of an old Eng lish manor house. Mullioned windows, finely masoned, opened in the shat tered wall, and an elaborate stone staircase, in the interstices of which stout shrubs were growing, gave, or once had given, an entrance through an arched doorway—an entrance now stoutly disputed by the glistening trunk of a gum-elemi tree and endless matted ropelike roots of giant vines and creepers that writhed like sei-p- ents over the whole edifice. Forcing my way up this staircase, I found my self in a stone hall some sixty feet long, at one end of which yawned a huge fireplace, its flue mounting up through a finely carved chimney, still standing firmly at the top of the southern gable. How Lad' this almost baronial mag nificence come to be in this far-away corner of a desert island? At first I concluded that here was a relic of the brief colonial prosperity of the Ba hamas, when its cotton lords lived like princes, with a slave population for retainers—days when even the bootblacks in Nassau played pitch- and-toss with gold pieces; but as I considered further, it seemed to m« that the style of the architecture jind the age of the building suggested an earlier date. Could it be that this had been the’home of one of those early eighteenth century pirates who took pride in flaunting the luxury and pom]^ of princes, and who had perhaps madti this his headquarters and stronghold for the storage of his loot on the re turn from his forays on the Spanish Main? This, as the more spirited con jecture, I naturally preferred, and, fh default of exact information, decided to accept. The more I pondered upon this fancy and remarked the extent of the ruins — including several subsidiary outhouses—and noted, too, one or two choked stone staircases that seemed to descend into the bowels of tile earth, the more plausible it seemed. In one or two places where I sus pected underground cellars—dungeons for ufJhappy captives belike, or strong vaults for the storage of the treasure —I tested the floors by dro{>ping h e a ^ stones, and they seemed unmistakably to reverberate with a hollow rumbling sound; but I could find no present way of getting down into them. As I said, the staircases that promised an en trance into them were choked with debris. But I promised myself to come some other day, with pick and shovel, and make an attempt at explor ing them. Meanwhile, after poking about In as much of the ruins as I could penetrate, I stepped out through a gap in one of the walls and found myself agal® on the'path by which I had entered, I noticed that it still ran on farther north, as having a destination beyond. So leaving the haunted ruins behind I pushed on and had gone but a shOTt distance when the path began to de scend slightly from the ridge on which the ruins stood; and there, Sn a broad square hollow before me, was the wel come living green of a flourishing plai> tation of coconut palms! It was evi dently of considerable extent—a quar ter of a mile or so, I judged—^and the palms were very thick and planted close together. To my surprise, too, I observed, as at length the path brought me to them after a sharp descent, that they were fenced in by a high bam boo stockade, for tlie most part in good condition, but here and there broken down with decay. -Through one of these gaps I pres* ently made my way and found myself among the soaring columns of the palms, hung aloft with clusters of the great green nuts. Fallen palm fronds made a carpet for my feet—^very pleas ant after the rough and tangled way f had traveled, and now and again one of the coco nuts would fall down with a thud amid the green silence. One of these, which narrowly mlfsed my head, sugges^d that here I had the opportunity of quenching very agree ably the thirst of which I had become suddenly aware. My claspknife soon made an opening through the ,tofUgh shell, and, seated on the ground, I set my mouth to it, and, raising the nut above my head, allowed the “milk”— cool as spring water—to gurgle dell* ciously down my parched throat. When at length I had drained It, and my head once more returned to its natural angle, I was suddenly made aware that my poaching had not gone unobeerved. miKiErs !c a package before the war ■c a package during the war !c a package NOW THE FLAVOR LASTS SO DOES THE PRICE! YOU CAN MAKE BIG PRCHTS IN OIL A FEW DOLLARS INVESTED WITH US MAY MAKE YOU RICH Our 2,060 acres in the rich Tularosa and Hneco Basins, New Mexico, including our Texas holdings, offers yon an j imsualusual chancehance foror Qnlck-Bignlck-Big Returns.eturns. nn c f Q R One company sold its shares at 5 cents. Ijater they be came worth $70. Our chances are BIG— geologists say- we i^re right in the next BU^MON-DOiDIiAE SPECIAL OPENING PRICE, 10c A Write Us Today—Gash or Terms — geologists say- AR Olli FIEIiD. , SHARE I Nortli American Oil & Refining Go. of Texas Seciu-Ity Bank Bldg., El Paso, Texas Not What She Wanted. Til ere were next door neighbors. She was sprinkling the lawn and he was silting out in his yard taking tlie cool of the ^air. He’s a bit slow of comprehension. “Give me lief?” she called to him, meaning that she dared him to let her turn the hose on him. “What’s that?” he a.sked. ■“I said do you give me lief?” she repeated. “Sure, you can have the whole paper.” he replied, reaching for newspaper on which he was sitting. He thought she wanted a page from his paper.—Indianapolis News. Bride Runs Away. Some time ago I attended the wed ding of my cousin. It was a quiet af fair. the pastor coming to the home. When he was just about to pronounce them man and wife the bride began to cry and ran into the other room. The groom followed her saying: “Mary, he Isn’t through yet.” BTfteen million is the average daily attendance at “movie shows” in the United States. UNCLE SAM a SCRAP chew in PLUG form HOISTS’FRESH No, Rafolo, a man should hide noth ing from his wife—even if it were po.ssible. Lumber Wanted Ash, oak, maple, birch, basswood, hemlock, c h e stnut and pine. A lso logs or standing timber, e specially ash. The H. Sheldon Mfg. Go.,Elli!and,Pa. bW B B T PO T A T O E S , D E L T c io U s T W H O E E - SO M E ! F in e s t q u a lity. F r t. japprox. to N . T. points. $5 per 3 bu. bbl. V. R. Strickland.d. Efelmar,felnaar, Delawelaware, 660 $5 pe r 3 bu. bb l., f.o.b bere. lan •E D Most surprising peppfe in a most curious habitation. (TO BE CONTINUED.) In Laroa Supply. you start to borrow troubU the loan Is generally oversubscribed.*^ Boston Transcript
