Ronicky Doone's Treasure by Max Brand (leveled readers TXT) 📕

“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.