“What do I know?” echoed the half-pay officer; “why, I was in London at the time of his trial, aye, and I had the pleasure of seeing him hanged at Execution Dock.”

“Then, sir, let me tell you that you saw as pretty a fellow hanged as ever trod shoe leather.  Aye!” putting his face nearer to that of the officer, “and there was many a coward looked on, that might much better have swung in his stead.”

The half-pay officer was silenced; but the indignation thus pent up in his bosom glowed with intense vehemence in his single eye, which kindled like a coal.

Peechy Prauw, who never could remain silent, now took up the word, and in a pacifying tone observed that the gentleman certainly was in the right.  Kidd never did bury money up the Hudson, nor indeed in any of those parts, though many affirm the fact.  It was Bradish and others of the buccaneers who had buried money, some said in Turtle Bay, others on Long-Island, others in the neighborhood of Hell Gate.  Indeed, added he, I recollect an adventure of Mud Sam, the negro fisherman, many years ago, which some think had something to do with the buccaneers.  As we are all friends here, and as it will go no farther, I’ll tell it to you.

“Upon a dark night many years ago, as Sam was returning from fishing in Hell Gate—­”

Here the story was nipped in the bud by a sudden movement from the unknown, who, laying his iron fist on the table, knuckles downward, with a quiet force that indented the very boards, and looking grimly over his shoulder, with the grin of an angry bear.  “Heark’ee, neighbor,” said he, with significant nodding of the head, “you’d better let the buccaneers and their money alone—­they’re not for old men and old women to meddle with.  They fought hard for their money, they gave body and soul for it, and wherever it lies buried, depend upon it he must have a tug with the devil who gets it.”

This sudden explosion was succeeded by a blank silence throughout the room.  Peechy Prauw shrunk within himself, and even the red-faced officer turned pale.  Wolfert, who, from a dark corner of the room, had listened with intense eagerness to all this talk about buried treasure, looked with mingled awe and reverence on this bold buccaneer, for such he really suspected him to be.  There was a chinking of gold and a sparkling of jewels in all his stories about the Spanish Main that gave a value to every period, and Wolfert would have given any thing for the rummaging of the ponderous sea-chest, which his imagination crammed full of golden chalices and crucifixes and jolly round bags of doubloons.

The dead stillness that had fallen upon the company was at length interrupted by the stranger, who pulled out a prodigious watch of curious and ancient workmanship, and which in Wolferts’ eyes had a decidedly Spanish look.  On touching a spring it struck ten o’clock; upon which the sailor called for his reckoning, and having paid it out of a handful of outlandish coin, he drank off the remainder of his beverage, and without taking leave of any one, rolled out of the room, muttering to himself as he stamped up-stairs to his chamber.