Legend of the Paymaster's Gold

by Jo Shawyer

  “If there’s any truth in any of this, someone, somewhere, lost or hid some gold on Commissioners Road near Reservoir Hill. Even if it wasn’t General Procter’s paymaster’s gold.”

  Sam grinned. “Absolutely! There’s got to be somebody’s gold on Reservoir Hill. We’ve just got to find it!”

  Chapter

  Five

  November 1812

  The war is so exciting — soldiers march past on the road in red uniforms with guns and gun carriages. The Indians are fighting on our side. Captain Carroll came today and told Father that our General Isaac Brock has been killed at Queenston by the Americans. Imagine if a battle like that was fought right here, between our place and the Tuckers’! If that happened, Mother and I would hide in the cellar and take our silver spoons with us.

  The next morning, when Sam got up, he wanted to get on his bike, find Ben, and go explore the scene of the legendary skirmish and legendary loss of the legendary gold. Maybe Ben would even bring his dad’s metal detector. Sam was fed up with unpacking from the move. He went downstairs, hungry for breakfast.

  His father was just leaving for work. “Your mother and I want to get started on the shed-room. I’ve arranged for the builder to come tomorrow to see if it’s possible to knock a door through to it from the kitchen, to make it more part of the house. I want it cleared out before he arrives. So, will you and your sister get busy on that today? Just put everything in the garage for now. Some of the odd pieces of lumber might come in handy. And we’ll definitely want to keep the firewood.”

  “But —” Sam started to protest.

  Eadie shot Sam a warning look from across the table.

  “Okay, Dad,” Sam said.

  Their parents didn’t take the story of the paymaster’s gold seriously, but Sam and Eadie and Ben did. They all thought that the gold really went missing. When they decided to search for it, they also decided not to tell their parents. It was best to keep their heads down and not argue.

  Sam lingered over an extra waffle at breakfast. Finally, he couldn’t delay any longer. He went upstairs and changed into his oldest clothes: a stained and faded green T-shirt and some seriously ripped jeans. He joined Eadie in the shed-room. She had put on a torn blue shirt and paint-spattered jeans, and she’d tied a red scarf over her long, dark hair. “This place is filthy, Sam. This is going to be an ‘Ugh’ job.”

  “If we were sixteen,” Sam grumbled, “we could get a paid summer job. But no, we have to do all this work for Mum and Dad and never get paid a cent.”

  Eadie sighed. “I was hoping to get some babysitting jobs this summer but I don’t know any of the families around here, so that’s not going to happen.”

  They continued working in gloomy silence, shifting old pieces of filthy lumber. Everything they touched threw up clouds of dust: broken chairs, broken screens for windows, boxes of rags. And mouse droppings. Lots of mouse droppings. They kept the door propped open but still the dust was choking them. They had to tie scarves over their noses to stop themselves from sneezing.

  After a few hours, they heard Liz call, “Sam! Eadie! Get cleaned up for lunch now. Take a break.”

  “Has Ben been here?” Sam asked his mother.

  “No. I saw him painting their fence a little while ago.”

  Sam and Eadie looked at each other. Ben’s day was turning out to be as bad as theirs!

  After lunch, as the shed-room emptied out, Sam and Eadie could see its size better. It was as big as the living room. They could also see that there were umpteen layers of old linoleum on the floor.

  “You’ll have to rip all that floor covering up,” Liz said. “If we’re lucky, there may be a decent wood floor underneath.”

  Sam and Eadie toiled on. They ripped out layers and layers of linoleum and carried it outside to make a huge pile under a tree. Underneath the linoleum there was indeed a wooden floor. Some of the planks were very wide, at least thirty centimetres across. They were impressed. And so was their mother.

  “What a lovely floor this could be, once it’s cleaned up. Look at those floorboards. They must be very old. It would take big old trees to yield planks that width.”

  Sam tore out another big, scummy brown piece of linoleum. “Hey, Eadie. Look at this! There’s a trap door!”

  He wanted to lift the trap door to investigate but his mother stopped him.

  “Goodness knows what’s down there,” she said. “Could be anything! Mould and decaying animals and cobwebs, even rats. Dad will be home soon. We can explore it then. We’ll need flashlights. See if you can find them in all this muddle of unpacking.”

  “But, Mum …”

  “No ‘buts.’ Wait for Dad.”

  But when Tom got home, they had to wait for supper.

  Then they had to wait through supper.

  Then they had to wait until Tom finished his coffee and changed into old clothes. Because the cellar would be filthy, of course.

  Finally, Tom lifted the trap door and peered down into the hole. He switched on the flashlight. “It’s definitely a cellar. But I can’t see how big it is. I’ll need a ladder to get down there.”

  “Wait, Dad,” Sam said. “We found a ladder today. It’s in the garage. We’ll get it.” Sam and Eadie ran off to get the ladder.

  When they returned with it, Tom placed it carefully down the cellar hole and stepped down into the darkness. “It’s just a root cellar, I think. It’s very small,” he called out to the others waiting above.

  Sam and Eadie wanted to see it, too. They clambered down the ladder. They both had flashlights. Sam flashed his around to get a better look. The cellar was like a cave. There was no floor, just earth. And the walls were earth, too. It wasn’t square, just a hole dug out unevenly. And not very big. They could only take five or six steps in each direction. And the ceiling beams weren’t very high up, either. Tom couldn’t stand upright and had to stoop. When Eadie pointed her flashlight above their heads, she could see the big rough beams that held up the floor of the shed-room. They looked like whole tree trunks. She reached up her hand to feel them, their roughness. Tom warned them not to poke around in the corners, but that is exactly what they wanted to do! He made them go up the ladder again.

  “You’ve had a look. That’s enough,” he declared.

  “But, Dad …”

  Tom lowered the trap door, stamped it shut, and turned to Sam and Eadie. “I don’t want you two going down there. It’s filthy. Leave it alone. That’s an order.”

  The twins went upstairs to Eadie’s room to talk it over.

  “The cellar is a perfect place to hide something, Eadie. If we could get Ben’s metal detector down in there….”

  “That’s not going to happen, Sam. Dad’s not going to let us down there again.”

  “It’s so unfair, Eadie. A little bit of dirt never hurt anyone.”

  “The shed-room is so weird, Sam. With those big tree trunks for beams that we saw in the cellar, I think it might have been a log cabin once.”

  “That’s crazy, Eadie.”

  “Not really. It seems like part of the house from the outside but it’s not.”

  Eadie took a piece of paper and a pencil and quickly drew a floor plan of their house.

  “See, Sam? That shed-room is one quarter of the house. But you can only get into it from outside. And it has a dirt cellar, but the rest of the house has a more proper basement with a cement floor and everything.”

  “Do you think it was part of a cabin that was here in 1812? Could the gold be hidden in the shed-room? Or the cellar?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. We can’t ask that lady who lived here before us, Mrs. Foster, because she’s gone away to Australia for months and months.”

  Sam flung himself down on Eadie’s bed. “This is all crazy. Why would anyone build a new house around an old log cabin?”

  “Don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”

  That night, Sam sprawled on his bed, thinking about the trap door and the cellar. What a perf
ect place to hide a bag of gold! But, at the same time, he had nagging doubts. Of course, if there was a paymaster, and if he hid his gold — say, to keep it safe during a skirmish — the cellar would be a perfect place. But then the cellar would have to have been here in 1813. But I’m sure I heard Mrs. Foster say this house was built in 1865. So that’s a dead end.

  Eadie sat on the edge of her bed and considered the shed-room. Her mind was racing. She thought of the possibilities. That room must be very old. Older than the rest of the house. Those floorboards in the shed-room are so wide, as wide as the ones in the log cabins I’ve seen in pioneer museums. It’s different from the floor in the living room. That’s just ordinary narrow hardwood. Maybe the shed-room was built earlier than the rest of the house. If that’s true, maybe the shed-room was here in 1813!

  Chapter

  Six

  October 1813

  I have not written in my journal for so long. Every day is just work and more work. But last night there was great excitement! The war came to us! There was shouting on the road and gunshots on the hill. Father made Mother and I hide in the cellar and I took our silver spoons with us, wrapped in a blanket. Father and John went to investigate. They didn’t come back until this morning. They told us that General Procter lost a battle with the Americans at Moraviantown, west of here. Last night he was retreating eastward along our road and some Kentucky Riflemen caught up with him on the hill. General Procter escaped and brave Captain Carroll fended off the Americans. Some of the wounded were taken to Tuckers’. Father said that some of the wagons were damaged and some baggage was lost. Now that the British soldiers have gone to Niagara, there is only the militia to protect us against raids by the Americans. Mother is terrified.

  The next morning, the builders phoned to say that they couldn’t come that day and probably would not start work on the shed-room for a week or two. Ben phoned to say that he’d run out of paint, so he was free of painting the fence for a day. Liz told the twins to take the day off as well. The weather was perfect for searching for gold.

  “Let’s visit the scene of the crime!” Ben suggested when he arrived at Sam and Eadie’s house.

  “The crime?”

  “Yeah, you know, a re-enactment. Let’s re-enact the skirmish on Reservoir Hill, with Procter hurrying east and Captain Carroll fending off the Americans. We might get some ideas about where to look for the gold.”

  “Perfect," said Sam.

  So they set off, on their bikes, and headed west on Commissioners Road. In less than three minutes they were peering down Reservoir Hill. It was a steep descent to the Thames River valley below. Halfway down the hill was a hairpin bend, the road turning first to the left and then to the right. It turned so sharply that they couldn’t see cars coming up the hill.

  Sam and Eadie told Ben what they had found on the Internet. Everything they had read was starting to make sense. Eadie reached into her knapsack for her notebook. “Look, here’s two different descriptions we found.” She read them out to the boys, “That huge Goodspeed book says ‘the knoll within the great bend of Commissioners Road.’ And Dad’s historical atlas has ‘the rounded hill … round which the Commissioners Road winds.’”

  From where they stood, it looked exactly the same today, two hundred years later: the steep hill, the winding road.

  “It’s amazing,” said Sam. “It all fits. Just like 1813 when General Procter and Captain Carroll came by.”

  They pretended that they were General Procter, Captain Carroll, and the group of soldiers and wounded struggling up the hill. When they looked back down the hill they realized that because of the sharp bends the soldiers would not have been able to see the Kentucky Riflemen chasing after them and getting closer and closer.

  They imagined General Procter heading up the hill as fast he could, travelling lightly, anxious to get his wife and children to safety. And then, later, brave Captain Carroll trying to get horses and baggage wagons and wounded men manoeuvred up the twisting hill, all the while knowing the Americans were coming up the hill behind them. And Captain Carroll turning to fend the Americans off.

  “This hill is really difficult,” said Sam.

  “I’d hate to have been Captain Carroll,” said Ben. “He would have had to turn around, maybe block the road with his wagons, to defend himself.” Ben had obviously been doing some online searching, too. “Did you know that Procter got court-martialled?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  “It’s a court. The army had its own court.”

  “What did he do wrong? He won all those battles in Michigan….”

  “It was because of his retreat. Right here, on Commissioners Road. He wasn’t blamed for retreating, because his supply line was cut and he was outnumbered by the Americans. But they said that he did a lousy job of organizing the retreat. He didn’t take care to burn the bridges across the Thames River after he had crossed them. He didn’t build any defences at Moraviantown. Not even abatis.” Ben explained when he saw the confusion on the twins’ faces. “Those are piles of brushwood made into a wall to hide behind. He also abandoned his troops in the field after the battle and he abandoned his Native allies, too. That’s when he just tore off eastward and along Commissioners Road past here.”

  “Wow! After all the good stuff he did, to lose it in the end.” Sam shook his head. “One mistake and he lost his whole career.”

  “Yeah. Pretty bad, eh?”

  “Maybe, in the end, he forgot that he was a soldier, and just became a dad looking after his family, getting them to safety,” Eadie said.

  But the boys rounded on her. “You can’t abandon more than 600 soldiers and 1,000 Native allies, Eadie!

  Ben propped his bike against his knee and reached to open his knapsack. With his red hair and fair skin, he sunburned easily. He took out his sunscreen and slathered it all over his arms and legs. Then they hauled their bikes up above the tight bend in the road and parked them against the steep banks.

  “Race you to the top!” Ben shouted.

  They scrambled up the bank. It was tough going: slippery with leaf litter, scratchy with wild roses. They had to grab the trunks of shrubs to keep from falling backwards, and they had to brace their feet against the tree trunks to keep their balance. Sam got a huge scratch on his arm, which oozed blood. Ben cracked his knee against a rock and it began to swell. Eadie’s legs and knees were covered with dirt from scrabbling in the dead leaves and earth at the base of the trees.

  Once at the top of the bank, they flopped on the grass.

  Ben inspected his swollen knee. “These banks are really steep! Good to defend but hard to attack. I guess that’s why the Kentucky Riflemen gave up so easily.”

  Sam and Ben discussed the range that a musket could fire — about 100 yards but only accurate to about 75 yards. They moved back from the bank to estimate the range but then they decided that the range didn’t really matter since you had to be right at the edge of the bank to see down into the ravine to the road below, anyway.

  Eadie looked around at the bushes and trees. “I wonder how many trees were here in 1813? Were they big like the ones in Reservoir Park? I mean, how could General Procter’s men see through the trees to shoot the Americans in the road below?”

  “Don’t know,” Sam said. “They were shooting in the dark, too.” He opened his knapsack. “I’m hungry.”

  Sam and Eadie pulled out the sandwiches and drinks from their knapsacks and shared with Ben. Ham, peanut butter and banana, Potato chips, pop, and chocolate chip cookies.

  “No carrot sticks!” Sam said gleefully.

  “We packed the lunch ourselves,” Eadie told Ben.

  He laughed. “Mothers!”

  After they had stuffed themselves, they sprawled lazily on the grass (in the shade, for Ben’s sake). They talked about the War of 1812, the skirmish on Reservoir Hill, and the lost gold. Then Sam and Eadie described their shed-room to Ben and how it had no door through to the rest of the house.

  �
��But the weirdest thing is, it’s got a trap door with a cellar down below. And it’s dug out, like a cave. We went down there with Dad last night. It would be a great place to hide gold….”

  “But,” Ben said skeptically, “was it there in 1813 when Procter passed by?”

  Sam sighed. “Well, Mrs. Foster told us that our house was built in 1865.”

  “Bummer.”

  Eadie listened, but said nothing. She had her own theory about the shed-room. She smiled to herself and reached for another cookie.

  Eventually the conversation drifted to school. The twins asked Ben about his high school, the one that they would be going to in September. They liked what they heard: lots of sports, a cool math teacher, a fantastic geography teacher, a music programme where they were allowed any music they liked — even rap — and a good art program. Maybe they would survive after all — even survive the notorious Old Grimshaw — although they would still miss their friends at their old school.

  Ben got to his feet, his swollen knee forgotten. “Come on. Let’s do a re-enactment. I went to one last year. It was of the Battle of Longwoods. That’s the War of 1812, too, and that was about eighty kilometres west of here. They had muskets and cannons and everything.”

  “But we’ll do General Procter and Captain Carroll today,” Eadie said.

  “I’ll be the British soldiers here on top of the bank. First of all, I’ll cover General Procter who is hurrying off up the hill ahead of the others. Then I’ll give cover for Captain Carroll as he struggles to organize the carts with the wounded and the baggage wagons up the hill out of harm’s way. Sam, you be the Americans, chasing Proctor’s party.”