“In this expedition to the ‘Bishop’s Hotel’ I had been attended by Jupiter, who had no doubt observed, for some weeks past, the abstraction of my demeanor, and took especial care not to leave me alone.  But on the next day, getting up very early, I contrived to give him the slip, and went into the hills in search of the tree.  After much toil I found it.  When I came home at night my valet proposed to give me a flogging.  With the rest of the adventure I believe you are as well acquainted as myself.”

“I suppose,” said I, “you missed the spot, in the first attempt at digging, through Jupiter’s stupidity in letting the bug fall through the right instead of through the left eye of the skull.”

“Precisely.  This mistake made a difference of about two inches and a half in the ’shot’—­that is to say, in the position of the peg nearest the tree; and had the treasure been beneath the ‘shot,’ the error would have been of little moment; but ‘the shot,’ together with the nearest point of the tree, were merely two points for the establishment of a line of direction; of course the error, however trivial in the beginning, increased as we proceeded with the line, and, by the time we had gone fifty feet, threw us quite off the scent.  But for my deep-seated convictions that treasure was here somewhere actually buried, we might have had all our labor vain.”

“I presume the fancy of the skull—­of letting fall a bullet through the skull’s eye—­was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag.  No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through this ominous insignium.”

“Perhaps so; still, I cannot help thinking that common-sense had quite as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency.  To be visible from the Devil’s seat, it was necessary that the object, if small, should be white; and there is nothing like your human skull for retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all vicissitudes of weather.”

“But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle —­how excessively odd!  I was sure you were mad.  And why did you insist on letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?”

“Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification.  For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree.  An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea.”

“Yes, I perceive; and now there is only one point which puzzles me.  What are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?”

“That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself.  There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them—­and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply.  It is clear that Kidd—­if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not—­it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor.  But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret.  Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen—­who shall tell?”