Ronicky Doone's Treasure by Max Brand (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📖
- Author: Max Brand
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“Maybe somebody else has lived here and found it and — “
He could not complete the sentence, so great was his disappointment. Ronicky, expecting nothing at all, was quite unperturbed. He looked at Jerry Dawn. She was as calm as he, but something of pity was in her eyes as she looked to her father. Was it possible that she, too, saw through the whole hoax and had simply undertaken the ride to appease the hungry eagerness of her father?
“We’ll go inside,” she suggested.
They entered the cabin through the front doorway, stepping over the door itself, which had fallen on the inside. All within was at the point of disintegration. The cast-iron stove was now a red, rusted heap in a corner. The falling of a rafter had smashed the bunk where it was built against the wall. The boards of the floor gave and creaked beneath their steps. In the corners were little yellowed heaps of paper — old letters, they seemed. And on the floor beneath the bunk Jerry Dawn found, face down, and yet with every page intact, the Bible which was always mentioned whenever the name of Cosslett was brought into conversation.
When she raised the book, it seemed that she raised the ghost of the old white-bearded hermit at the same time. In spite of the ruin, the terrible scene rushed back upon the memory of each of the three — Jack Moon and his men tumbling through the door — the two explosions of guns — the hurling of the casket through the window — the fall of the hermit.
Suddenly Hugh Dawn shouted in alarm. Making a careless step with his great weight, he had driven his foot crashing and rending through the flooring where rain had rotted away the wood except for a mere shell. He scrambled out of his trap, half laughing and half alarmed.
“The old gent had a cellar,” said Ronicky, “judging by the way your leg went through that floor.”
Jerry Dawn looked up from the Bible, whose yellowed, time-stained leaves she had been turning with reverent fingers. The awe went out of her eyes, and bright interest came in its place.
“A cellar?” she asked. “Then let’s look at it. Perhaps that’s the place where he hid all the gold, dad?”
Her father snorted.
“Are you trying to make a joke out of this?” he asked heavily. “Hide the gold in the cellar! Hide fifteen or twenty million dollars’ worth of gold in a cellar!”
“Twenty millions?” gasped Ronicky, beginning to fear for the sanity of his companion. “Are you serious about that, Dawn?”
“Why not? The band must of took a clean forty millions, and out of everything that they took, that old hawk, according to Hampden, got fifty per cent. He was a business man, right enough! And what’s half of forty? Twenty millions, boy!”
That hungry glittering came into his glance again, and Ronicky shook his head.
“But we’ll see about the cellar.” He nodded to Jerry Dawn.
She leaned to see him put his fingers through a gaping crack between boards, work them to a firm grip, and then rip up the whole length of the plank. Below them opened the black depth of the cellar. Ronicky lighted a match and dropped it into the aperture.
“Six foot of hole,” he announced. “Down I go!”
Two more boards were torn away, and he prepared to lower himself.
“But what good does all that foolishness do?” groaned the despairing fortune hunter. “If the box ain’t under the veranda — “
“Ladies bring luck,” answered Ronicky, grinning. “I’m going to follow her orders every time I get a chance.”
And down he dropped into the hole.
“Ever hear of such crazy work?” growled the father.
But Jerry was becoming interested in the fate of her own suggestion.
“Who’d put a box like that in a cellar!” exclaimed Hugh Dawn. “Who’d do that — put it right out in plain view!”
“Plain view? Who suspected a cellar under a house like this until you put your foot through the floor?”
Ronicky was lighting matches in the darkness below. Presently he called: “I see how come the veranda to be down to the ground level. All the stringers holding up the floor on this side are rotten and smashed over sidewise. And — “
He stopped.
“We’re beat,” said Hugh Dawn, “before we get fairly started. I’ve come back and put my head into the mouth of the lion for nothing. That skunk Whitwell aimed to make a fool of me, that was all! Why should he of told me the truth, anyway?”
“Because dying men don’t lie!” shouted Ronicky Doone through the hole in the floor, and at the same time he cast up what looked like a great, rectangular chunk of rust. It fell with a crash onto the floor, the jar of the impact knocking off from its sides long flakes of the red dust, so that the metal looked forth from beneath.
Ronicky vaulted up through the hole and stood exultant beside them.
“He did put it under the veranda!” he cried. “He put it so far under that it rolled right on down into the cellar. And there it’s laid ever since!”
They stood about it in trembling excitement, Jerry so agape with astonishment that it was plain she had considered, up to this point, that the whole story was a myth. Hugh Dawn was beyond use of his muscles. Only Ronicky Doone had not been incapacitated by wonder and excitement.
For unquestionably it was the “forty-pound box” so often referred to. Even Ronicky Doone was convinced. Of course there was no reason to think that the box proved anything, or that its discovery lead to important things. But as it stood there in the center of the three, a mass of red rust, its presence verified one step in the story of the Cosslett treasure, and thereby the whole trail seemed to be the truth. The rotting strong box was like a fourth presence. Its silence was more eloquent than a voice.
“It’s heavy enough to have a tidy bunch of gold in it,” said Ronicky. “Let’s get her open. Did you bring a sledge hammer, Dawn?”
The latter looked at him reproachfully.
“Figure I’d come on a trip like this without getting a pack ready long before? Nope, Ronicky, I had my pack under my arm when I left the house on the run last night, and the things in the pack are a pick and a shovel and a chisel and an eight-pound sledge.”
As he enunciated the last word Ronicky disappeared through the door. Hugh Dawn picked up the strong box and, carrying it outside, had braced it firmly, lock up, between two big stones ready for the hammering which was to open it. Ronicky came a moment later with the hammer.
“Now,” Hugh cried, brandishing the hammer about his head, “look sharp!”
He loosed a terrific blow which landed fairly and squarely upon the lock. But the hammer, after crunching through the rust, rebounded idly. The lock had not even been cracked. He whirled it again, again, and again. His back went up and down, and the sledge became a varying streak of light that struck against the box, always hitting accurately on one spot. Ronicky Doone looked on in amazement, and the girl’s eyes shone in delight at the prowess of her father, when there was a slight sound of cracking; at another blow the box flew open.
Inside there were exposed a few scraps of paper, and nothing else!
Ronicky Doone gasped with excitement. Was it true, then, that what the box was used for was to guard a secret and not money?
Hugh Dawn, panting with labor and joy, gathered the paper fragments in trembling fingers.
“Read ‘em, Jerry,” he said. “I — my eyes are all blurred. Where’s the map, first off?”
There were three slips of paper, apparently fly leafs of books torn off, and the girl examined them.
“There’s no map,” she said. “I’m sorry, dad.”
“No map!” he shouted. “Let me see! Let me see!”
He snatched them from her, glaring; then he crumpled the paper into a ball and cast it to the ground.
“No wonder Cosslett died with a smile,” he groaned. “It was only a joke that he locked up in that box and threw away so careful. If ghosts walk the earth, he’s somewhere in the air now laughing at me.” He looked up as though he half expected to see the old face take form out of the empty atmosphere.
“Nothing but a list of names and some figuring,” the girl said with a sigh. “I’m afraid it was only a jest.”
Ronicky Doone alone had not seen the writing. He ran a few steps after the ball of paper as it rolled along in the breeze, picked it up, and smoothed out the separate bits. What he found was exactly what had been reported. First there were two slips covered with a list of names and dates:
H. L. L. — September 22.
Gregory — May 9.
Scottie — August 14.
The list continued, each separate name followed by dates ranging through two years until October of the second year. With this month the dates were crowded together. Half of the first slip and all of the second were covered with names and dates of that month. And last of all was the name “Hampden, October 19.”
It struck a faint light in Ronicky’s groping imagination.
“Hampden was the gent that run the affair for Cosslett, wasn’t he?” he asked.
“What of it?”
“Here’s his name the last of the lot.”
“And what does that mean?” Hugh Dawn asked.
Jerry Dawn came and peered with interest over the shoulder of Ronicky.
“It goes to prove that we’re working on more than hearsay,” the girl said. “Goes to prove that there was really a connection between Cosslett and Hampden, and in that case, why, Cosslett is simply a murderous old miser who used other men to do killings so that he could get gold, and who then sat down with his Bible and thought about his ill-gotten gains.”
“I knew all that before,” declared her father. “But this is a blank trail, Jerry. Cosslett’s gold will rest and rot. No man’ll ever find it — all them millions!”
Ronicky turned to the third slip. It was a compact jumble of figures. He read as follows:
(1, 1, 3, 2; 1, 1, 6, 5; 1, 1, 9, 1; 1, 1, 12, 5) (2, 9, 1, 13; 2, 9, 1, 4; 2, 9, 3, 6)
So it ran on through line after line of bracketed numbers with commas and semicolons interspersed.
Ronicky Doone dropped the paper to his side. “Dawn,” he said, “I figure that every word you’ve said is right, except where you begin to give up hope. But this mess of figures — I dunno what could have been in Cosslett’s head when he started to make it up. Anyway, it can’t do us any good.”
He was about to throw the papers to the wind, but the girl stayed his hand.
“Just a moment,” she said hastily, and, taking the slip which contained the figures, she perused it carefully.
Ronicky and her father anxiously turned toward her. Since both of them were convinced that the trail to the treasure began at the shack of Cosslett, and since there was no possible clue save that piece of paper and the list of numbers, they hoped against hope that Jerry could make something out of it.
“If they’s any sense to it,” said her father, “Jerry’ll get at it. She
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