“Ha! ha!” said I, “to be sure I have no right to laugh at you—­a million and a half of money is too serious a matter for mirth—­but you are not about to establish a third link in your chain:  you will not find any especial connection between your pirates and a goat; pirates, you know, have nothing to do with goats; they appertain to the farming interest.”

“But I have just said that the figure was not that of a goat.”

“Well, a kid, then—­pretty much the same thing.”

“Pretty much, but not altogether,” said Legrand.  “You may have heard of one Captain Kidd.  I at once looked on the figure of the animal as a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature.  I say signature, because its position on the vellum suggested this idea.  The death’s-head at the corner diagonally opposite had, in the same manner, the air of a stamp, or seal.  But I was sorely put out by the absence of all else—­of the body to my imagined instrument—­of the text for my context.”

“I presume you expected to find a letter between the stamp and the signature.”

“Something of that kind.  The fact is, I felt irresistibly impressed with a presentiment of some vast good fortune impending.  I can scarcely say why.  Perhaps, after all, it was rather a desire than an actual belief;—­but do you know that Jupiter’s silly words, about the bug being of solid gold, had a remarkable effect on my fancy?  And then the series of accidents and coincidences—­these were so very extraordinary.  Do you observe how mere an accident it was that these events should have occurred on the sole day of all the year in which it has been, or may be, sufficiently cool for fire, and that without the fire, or without the intervention of the dog at the precise moment in which he appeared, I should never have become aware of the death’s-head, and so never the possessor of the treasure?”

“But proceed—­I am all impatience.”

“Well; you have heard, of course, the many stories current—­the thousand vague rumors afloat about money buried, somewhere on the Atlantic coast, by Kidd and his associates.  These rumors must have had some foundation in fact.  And that the rumors have existed so long and so continuously, could have resulted, it appeared to me, only from the circumstance of the buried treasure still remaining entombed.  Had Kidd concealed his plunder for a time, and afterwards reclaimed it, the rumors would scarcely have reached us in their present unvarying form.  You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.  Had the pirate recovered his money, there the affair would have dropped.  It seemed to me that some accident—­say the loss of a memorandum indicating its locality—­had deprived him of the means of recovering it, and that this accident had become known to his followers, who otherwise might never have heard that treasure had been concealed at all, and who, busying themselves in vain, because unguided, attempts to regain it, had given first birth, and then universal currency, to the reports which are now so common.  Have you ever heard of any important treasure being unearthed along the coast?”