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Page 88
This stairway was not used then, nor is it now.
It is unnecessary, inconvenient, dusty, and dark as night, and was a
blunder of the architect who designed the building.
This stairway ends above at the tent-shaped space between the roof and
the joists.
That space is dark and forbidding, and being useless is rarely visited.
Sharp opened this door and gazed for a moment up this narrow cobwebbed
stairway.
* * * *
After dark that night a man opened cautiously one of the lower windows
of the Land Office, crept out with great circumspection and disappeared
in the shadows.
* * * *
One afternoon, a week after this time, Sharp lingered behind again after
the clerks had left and the office closed. The next morning the first
comers noticed a broad mark in the dust on the upstairs floor, and the
same mark was observed below stairs near a window.
It appeared as if some heavy and rather bulky object had been dragged
along through the limestone dust. A memorandum book with "E. Harris"
written on the flyleaf was picked up on the stairs, but nothing
particular was thought of any of these signs.
Circulars and advertisements appeared for a long time in the papers
asking for information concerning Edward Harris, who left his mother's
home on a certain date and had never been heard of since.
After a while these things were succeeded by affairs of more recent
interest, and faded from the public mind.
* * * *
Sharp died two years ago, respected and regretted. The last two years of
his life were clouded with a settled melancholy for which his friends
could assign no reason. The bulk of his comfortable fortune was made
from the land he obtained by fraud and crime.
The disappearance of the file was a mystery that created some commotion
in the Land Office, but he got his patent.
* * * *
It is a well-known tradition in Austin and vicinity that there is a
buried treasure of great value somewhere on the banks of Shoal Creek,
about a mile west of the city.
Three young men living in Austin recently became possessed of what they
thought was a clue of the whereabouts of the treasure, and Thursday
night they repaired to the place after dark and plied the pickaxe and
shovel with great diligence for about three hours.
At the end of that time their efforts were rewarded by the finding of a
box buried about four feet below the surface, which they hastened to
open.
The light of a lantern disclosed to their view the fleshless bones of a
human skeleton with clothing still wrapping its uncanny limbs.
They immediately left the scene and notified the proper authorities of
their ghastly find.
On closer examination, in the left breast pocket of the skeleton's coat,
there was found a flat, oblong packet of papers, cut through and through
in three places by a knife blade, and so completely soaked and clotted
with blood that it had become an almost indistinguishable mass.
With the aid of a microscope and the exercise of a little imagination
this much can be made out of the letter; at the top of the papers:
B--x a-- ---rip N--2--92.
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