Jump to content

Page:Mythsandlegends03skingoog.pdf/311

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

As to Buried Riches

the same, for it is said that the watch of evil spirits will be given over at midnight, but they do not know of what date. They will be on hand at the spot revealed to them through the vision of a "hex layer" (a vision that cost them fifty cents), until the night arrives when there are no blue flames.

In the southern part of Chester County, Pennsylvania, is money, too, but just where nobody knows. A lonely, crabbed man, who died there in a poor hut after the Revolution, owned that he had served the British as a spy, but said that he had spent none of the gold that he had taken from them. He was either too sorry for his deeds, or too mean to do so. He had put it in a crock and buried it, and, on his death-bed, where he made his statement, he asked that it might be exhumed and spent for some good purpose. He was about to tell where it was when the death-rattle choked his words.

The Isle of the Yellow Sands, in Lake Superior, was supposed by Indians to be made of the dust of gold, but it was protected by vultures that beat back those who approached, or tore them to pieces if they insisted on landing. An Indian girl who stole away from her camp to procure a quantity of this treasure was pursued by her lover, who, frightened at the risk she was about to run from the vultures, stopped her flight by staving in the side of her canoe, so that she was compelled to take refuge in his, and he rowed home with her before the birds had come to the attack.

289