If it had been his own heart that he had hit in the sand his breast could hardly have thrilled more sharply.

It was the treasure-box!

Parson Jones himself leaped down into the hole, and began scraping away the sand with his hands as though he had gone crazy.  At last, with some difficulty, they tugged and hauled the chest up out of the sand to the surface, where it lay covered all over with the grit that clung to it.

It was securely locked and fastened with a padlock, and it took a good many blows with the blade of the spade to burst the bolt.  Parson Jones himself lifted the lid.

Tom Chist leaned forward and gazed down into the open box.  He would not have been surprised to have seen it filled full of yellow gold and bright jewels.  It was filled half full of books and papers, and half full of canvas bags tied safely and securely around and around with cords of string.

Parson Jones lifted out one of the bags, and it jingled as he did so.  It was full of money.

He cut the string, and with trembling, shaking hands handed the bag to Tom, who, in an ecstasy of wonder and dizzy with delight, poured out with swimming sight upon the coat spread on the ground a cataract of shining silver money that rang and twinkled and jingled as it fell in a shining heap upon the coarse cloth.

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.

[Illustration:  “‘Tis enough,’ cried out parson Jones, ’to make us both rich men’”]

“’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.