Yes, sir, cold to the touch like it had been for hours, and holding a blackened lantern in his poor old fist--dead as dead--face down in the coral sand. We rolled him over to do what we could for him, but he had passed to a place beyond help or hurt. I went back for Tom in a protuberation, saying, "My God! Tom, what do you think's happened?--Old Dibs's dead in the graveyard!" I guess the old man had never been so close to Tom as he had been to me, boarding in my house and almost a father to me and the wife, for Tom took it awful cool, and asked almost the first thing about the money.
"You and me will divide on that," he says.
"Sure," I says, "but that can stand over till afterwards, Tom."
"Stand over, nothing!" he says, very sharp; and with that we both set off running for my house.
It was a jumpy thing to enter that darkened room, with the feeling you couldn't shake off that Old Dibs was peering in at us, and that every minute we'd hear his footstep, everything laid out just as he had last touched them, and almost warm, even to his slippers and his collar and the old hat against the wall. But it made no more difference to Tom than if it had been his own hat, and he tramped in like a policeman, saying, "Where is it, Bill?"
"In one of them two camphor-wood chests," says I.
He lifted up one of them by the end and let it fall ker-bang!
"Try the other," says I, with a sudden sinking.
He let that crash, too, and turning around, looked me in the face.
"Just what I suspected all along," said Tom, as savage as a tiger. "He's made way with it!"
We didn't stop to speak another word, but rummaged the whole room upside down.
"He's buried it," says Tom, savager than ever, "and what kind of a bastard was you to let him?"
"None of your business!" he repeated, screaming out at me like a woman--"to have a quarter of a million by the tail and let it go? You might have been slack about your own half, but it was a swine's trick not to keep track of mine!"
"He can't have taken it very far," I said.
"Not far!" yelled Tom, making an insult of every word I said. "Why, what was to prevent him lugging away a little this day and that, till the whole caboodle was sunk in a solid block? What do you suppose he was doing with the lantern, you tom-fool? Planting it, of course--planting every dollar of it, night after night, while you were snoozing in your silly bed."