“This map?” said the Rat.
“This map, which was drawed by the land pirate’s own brother to show where the treasure was,” said the Tough Customer. “So I said I’d go in with him, and he explained all he knew about the map, and the night before I was turned loose I stole the map off him, and I dropped it through the window. And the next day, when I was turned loose, I went around under the window and picked up the map and beat it for up here as fast as I could. Because this here word on the back of the map is the key word. ‘Riverbank,’ see? That’s the place to go to, to start out from, to find the treasure.”
“Well, you couldn’t be much nearer,” said the Rat.
“All right! And here’s the map itself,” said the Tough Customer. “You say you know places hereabouts; what do you make of it?”
“Let me get a good look at it,” said the Rat. “Why, pshaw! It looks plain enough! Here’s the river, because it is marked ‘river.’ And this bent business is a slough coming into the river. And this crooked line would be a creek emptying into the slough.”
“That’s how I’d make it out,” said the Tough Customer.
“Sure!” said the Rat. “And these lines mean two roads crossing each other, don’t they? And this is a house or barn in the lot at the crossroads. And here’s a cross-mark—this X here. That ought to be where the treasure is buried, hey?”
“Well, now, would it be?” asked the Tough Customer. “How about this arrow? This arrow points right to where the road crosses the creek. Don’t that mean that that is where the treasure is? Suppose there is a bridge there, or a culvert. Mightn’t the money be hid there? Well, we could look both places. How about this ‘23 miles’ and ‘Greenland’?”
“Greenland? Sure enough, that says Greenland!” said the Rat, all excited. “Why, pardner, this is the easiest thing you ever saw! I know where this Greenland is—Greenland is a crossroads store up the river four or five miles from here, over on the Illinois side, just on top of the hills. Used to be quite a village, years ago, but it’s only a store and post-office now. Why, I can take you right there, pardner. And there’s a creek there, too, crosses the road. Only—
“Greenland ain’t any 23 miles back from the slough, or from the river, either. It’s only—say!”
The boys heard him slap his knee.
“Why, shucks!” he exclaimed. “That ain’t 23 miles. That’s meant for two-three miles. Two or three miles. And that’s about what this Greenland store is back from the river.”
He let his voice fall into a mysterious whisper.
“Why, pardner,” he whispered, “this is as easy as falling off a log! We can walk right to the spot. And that arrow don’t point to no treasure, either. That arrow is like any other arrow on a map—it points north. It was put there to show where north is.”
“But that would make the Mississippi River flow from east to west,” objected the Tough Customer.
“And that’s why I say so!” declared the Rat. “Because it does flow right spang from east to west, all the way from Derlingport to Riverbank—thirty good miles! If that map showed a river flowing from north to south, it would be wrong, because the Mississippi don’t flow that way at Greenland store. You bet! All we’ve got to do is to go right to the bank of the creek where that cross-mark is, and if that treasure is there, we’ll find her!”
“So you’ll put off cider-hunting awhile, I guess,” said the Tough Customer. “Gimme the map; I’ll put it back where I keep it.”
He shuffled around inside the boat, putting the map back.
“Well, now,” the Rat said, “as to putting off hunting that cider, it seems to me, seeing we’re right here on the island, we might take a day or two and—”
What he would have said next nobody ever knew, for here came Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar and Rover and I, and Orph had his gun and an axe, and Uncle Oscar had his pistol and an axe, and they were mad! They were mighty mad! Orph handed me his gun and up with his axe and chopped the shore line of the shanty-boat, and swung the axe and brought it down whang against the end of the boat. You should have seen the boards fly! In three blows Orph had the whole end of that shanty-boat knocked to splinters, and the Tough Customer and the Rat were out into the water, shouting and swearing and pulling the boat through the willows into the slough, to try to save some of it, anyway, and Orph stooped and picked up slabs of wet driftwood and slammed them at the two.
When the shanty-boat was out past the willow fringe, the Tough Customer swung aboard and grabbed his pole and began poling for dear life, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and then Orph slung one last slab at them and missed by ten feet, and about all that was left of the excitement was Rover, trying to bark his head off.
“That’s the end of them!” Orph said. “That’ll be the last we ever see of those two.”
He took his gun and he and Uncle Oscar started down toward the end of the island to watch the shanty-boat float by, and we all started down there with them. But when Jibby had gone a few yards, he stopped short. Then he turned back and worked his way through the willows to where the shanty-boat had been. He picked up a broken board and bent over the water and fished something white out from among the splinters of houseboat.
“What is it?” I asked, and he opened it and showed me.
It was the map of the pirate’s treasure place.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RED-HEADED BANDIT
Well, as soon as Jibby Jones got the map, we went down to the lower end of the island, and we saw the Tough Customer’s shanty-boat floating out of the slough and on down the river, and then we went back.
Orpheus Cadwallader and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar went back to the cottages, and we boys began looking for dead fish where we had left off, and as we looked we talked about the Tough Customer and the Rat and the land pirate’s treasure. We did not study the map then, because it was soaking wet. Jibby Jones pinned it inside his hat, so it could dry out there.
As we went along, Skippy and Tad and Wampus told me what they had heard the Tough Customer say to the Rat, and what they had heard the Rat say to the Tough Customer, and when they had told it all, Wampus said to me:
“George, I’ll bet the man the Tough Customer stole the map from was the Red-Headed Bandit that tried to steal Rover last year. Because, listen—the Red-Headed Bandit had a scar over his eye, didn’t he?”
“You bet he did!” I said. And all of a sudden I had a scared feeling, as if there was danger and mystery all around me and I knew it, but couldn’t see where or what it was exactly. You get the same feeling, sometimes, when you are walking through a big patch of weeds, taller than your head, and all of a sudden you hear a queer noise to the left of you, and a queer noise to the right of you, and then a cobweb strikes you across the face and sticks there, and you hear another queer noise behind you. That’s how I felt now—as if there was queerness and mystery all around our island. Because here was the Red-Headed Bandit in this pirate’s treasure business, and I had never thought of the Red-Headed Bandit as anything much.
The business of the Red-Headed Bandit was like this: A year ago, the year before Jibby Jones came to our island, my sister May was going to be married to Mr. Edwin Skreever, of Derlingport, Iowa, on September 11th, in the evening. They were going to be married at our house down in town—in Riverbank—and from the way May and mother talked about it you would think it was going to be grand and lovely and everything. So May said to mother:
“Well, I suppose George and Wampus will have to be at the wedding, but I tremble to think of it. I know they will do some awful thing and spoil everything, but I suppose they will have to be there.”
May knew mighty well I wouldn’t go to her wedding or to anybody’s wedding unless Wampus went, too. We always go together.
“We’ll just have to hope for the best,” mother said.
“Well, there is one thing certain,” May said, “I’m not going to have those two boys down there until the last possible moment. When we go down to make the preparations, I want them left up here on the island where they will be out of mischief.”
That suited me, all right! I didn’t want to go down and have May nagging at me with her “Do keep your hands off that, George!” and “Please don’t touch that, George!”
We had been up there on Birch Island all summer—our family and Wampus Smale’s family and a dozen other families—living in the cottages on stilts and having a good time on the island and on the good old Mississippi. So, about the 1st of September, most of the families went back down to town, but our family and the Smales did not. They waited a few days longer.
Just about then—about the 1st of September—Mr. Edwin Skreever came down from Derlingport in his motor-boat to visit with us until the wedding. I don’t say I liked him much; neither did Wampus. Maybe he was all right, but he was no fun. He thought he was wonderful, I guess, and May thought so, but he was too haughty to suit me. I guess he didn’t like boys much and he thought he had to be severe and solemn with them. He acted as if he thought he might die if the creases got out of his trousers. He had no use for my dog, either. He was always saying: “Down! Lie down! Get down! Get out!” to Rover. He did not like him.
You see, Rover is a pretty big dog and affectionate. He would rush up to Mr. Edwin Skreever and jump up on him and try to kiss him on the face. Sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin Skreever’s necktie and one paw on his collar, and sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin Skreever’s vest and the other sort of tangled in his watch-chain. Then Mr. Edwin Skreever would whack at him and say: “Get down you beast!” But not when May was handy.
Rover was my dog, because May had given him to me, but he was May’s dog, too, because Mr. Jack Betts had given him to May. I never knew when Rover was my dog and when he was May’s dog, because girls are mostly Indian givers. When she wanted to pet Rover and take him walking, he was May’s dog—so she claimed—but when Rover howled or needed to be fed, May would say: “For goodness’ sake, George, attend to that dog of yours!”
I guess one reason Mr. Edwin Skreever did not care much for Rover was because Mr. Jack Betts had given him to May. I guess Mr. Edwin Skreever was jealous, because when Mr. Jack Betts gave Rover to May everybody thought Mr. Jack Betts was the one she was going to be married to.
Well, no matter! I only want to tell you the awful fix Wampus and I got into on account of being left up there on the island where we would be out of mischief.
On the 9th of September Parcell came up in his big motor-launch and took May and mother and the Smales all down to town to get ready for May’s wedding. So they left Mr. Edwin Skreever on the island with me and Wampus, because we could go down in Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat on the 11th, which was the wedding day. I guess they were almost as glad to have Mr. Edwin Skreever out of the way as they were to have me and Wampus out of the way.
That left nobody on the island but us three and Orpheus Cadwallader, who is the caretaker and stays on the island all winter. He was to close up our cottage when we left.
So that was all right. The last thing May said before she got aboard Parcell’s launch was:
“Now, George, you be sure you don’t let Rover wander off somewhere so you can’t bring him down when you come. You had better tie him up.”
I’ve told you about Rover, and how he would wander for miles around the island, and even swim across to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a dead fish to perfume himself with.
The only way to keep him from wandering after dead fish was to tie him up, and then he howled all night. That was his second bad habit, and it was almost worse than dead fish. He was the loudest and saddest howler I ever heard. When you tied him up, he would sit down on his haunches and put his nose up and open his mouth and just let loose all the agony of all the dogs that ever suffered pain or sorrow from the days of Adam right on to to-day. And loudly, too. When Rover really got interested in howling, you could hear him five miles.
The only thing in Riverbank or anywhere near it that made as much noise as Rover’s howl was Mr. Jack Betts’s motor-boat. His motor-boat was a speed boat and was called the Skittery III, because Mr. Jack Betts had run the Skittery I and the Skittery II onto snags and mashed them to splinters. I guess that was one reason why May did not want to marry Mr. Jack Betts—she was afraid he would mash himself to splinters some day. A husband that is mashed to splinters is not much use around the house.
Mr. Edwin Skreever used to say:
“That’s Jack Betts all over! He uses a barrel of gasoline every time he takes out that boat of his—fourteen dollars to risk his life for ten miles of idiotic speed, and he hasn’t a dollar in the bank! Twenty-seven years old and not a dollar to his name!”
Even father would not ride in the Skittery III. It was a much faster boat than the others and could make thirty-five miles an hour upstream on our old Mississippi, and that is some speed! When it was going full tilt the Skittery III stood up on about three inches of the stern end of its keel and simply skittered on the water, and all twelve cylinders screamed. It made more noise than forty airplanes. It made more noise than ten planing mills. I never knew anything that made such a noise.
And go? Mr. Jack Betts and his chauffeur had to wear leather helmets to keep the wind from blowing the hair right off their heads. Father said that if the boat ever took a nose dive it would ram itself so deep into the bottom of the water that Jack Betts would have to go around to China and pull it the rest of the way through—only there wouldn’t be any Jack Betts to go to China.
Well, about four o’clock on September 10th we heard a noise down the river that sounded like forty-seven sawmills and we knew Mr. Jack Betts was starting the Skittery III. Town is four miles down river and in about a minute the Skittery III came roaring up into our chute and Mr. Jack Betts shut off the power and taxied in to the shore of our island. He had a note for Mr. Edwin Skreever, and it was from May. Mr. Jack Betts stood around and asked if there was any answer. Mr. Edwin Skreever said there was not—that May only wanted him to go down a little earlier the next day than she had told him before. He was rather stiff about it, and Mr. Jack Betts was just as stiff, and after a minute or two Mr. Jack Betts went down and got into the Skittery III and skittered back to town.
Wampus and I sat on the rocks of the ripraps in front of our cottage and watched the Skittery III skitter. Old Rover was there, piling all over us, and we kept pushing him away and telling him to sit down. Every now and then he would tangle us in the rope that was tied to his collar.
“You had better tie up that dog,” Mr. Edwin Skreever said. “If he wanders off to-night, you may not have him to-morrow.”
Now, just notice how things happen in this world sometimes. Mr. Edwin Skreever was on the porch of our cottage, behind the wire screens where the mosquitoes could not get at him, and he was not very quiet. I guess he was thinking of how he would have to be married the next day. Anyway, he was walking up and down the porch, putting his hands into his pockets and taking them out again. Every minute or so he would say something to us, as a man does when he is nervous. First he would tell us to tie up the dog, then he would say he hoped the dog did wander away, and that he would be glad if he never saw the dog again.
“And just you let me tell you one thing!” he said. “I’m not going to have that dog jumping all over me at my wedding. I’m not going to have that dog clawing all over me and clawing all over May and making a general nuisance of himself. And I won’t have him tied up and howling. I’m not going to let that dog spoil my wedding. You understand that!”
I just said “Aw!” and went on talking with Wampus and wrestling with Rover. So, in a little while, the Bright Star came along down the river with a couple of Government barges loaded with willows. There are not many boats on the river now, so Wampus and I looked at the Bright Star as she went by, and when she reached the lower end of our island she veered in and laid the two barges alongside the ripraps. The men ran a couple of cables ashore and made the two barges fast by hitching the cables to a couple of trees and then the Bright Star sheered off and crossed the chute and went out of sight behind Buffalo Island, across the chute. It was no fun sitting where we were listening to Mr. Edwin Skreever scold, so Wampus and I got up and went down the path to take a look at the two barges.
They were like plenty of other Government barges we had seen. These two had their numbers painted on them—“U.S. 420” and “U.S. 426”—and they were seventeen feet wide and eighty-two feet long. Wampus and I had been in and over those very two barges more than once. We knew just how they were made and all about them.
The two barges, as they lay along the shore there, were piled high with cut willows. The Government men cut the willows where they grow at the lower ends of islands and take them on the barges to places where they are repairing dams or ripraps. They throw the willows on the dams, butt end upstream, and dump rocks on them. Ripraps along the banks are made that same way. It is not often you see two barges alone; the steamer usually tows four or six at a time. All these barges are decked over. The decks are made of four-inch planks, and at each end of this flooring are two hatches, with lids. When nobody is around to order a fellow off the barges, he can pull up these hatch covers and get inside the barges.
The inside of one of those barges is not much of a place to be in. When you go down through the hatch, you see that the inside is damp, with maybe three or four inches of water in it, and a smell of tar or oakum. It is about five feet from the bottom boards to the floorboards, so a fellow can stand up there, but he can’t run much because there are criss-cross braces. Neither is the inside of a barge one big room. Two great, thick bulkheads, or wooden walls, run lengthwise of the barge and cut it into three narrow halls—as you might call them—eighty feet long and about five feet wide.
These two barges were pretty well loaded with willows. One of them was loaded from the tip of its bow to the end of its stern—willows piled ten or twelve feet high. The other, the “U.S. 420,” was almost as well loaded, but not quite.
So Wampus and I stood looking at the barges and we thought maybe we would climb aboard and climb on the willows and have some fun, but, when we were going to, a man we hadn’t seen sat up and looked at us. He had red hair and a scar over one eye. And that was the first we saw of the Red-Headed Bandit.
CHAPTER IX
THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER
The Red-Headed Bandit had been lying on top of the willows, and when he sat up so sudden he gave us a scare. We did not like the looks of him.
“Hello!” he said, and he looked us over. Then he said, “Where did you get that dog?”
“Raised him from a pup,” I said.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t try to tell me anything like that, young feller. That’s my dog. A feller stole that dog from me.”
Well, I began to back away. I reached down and got hold of the rope that was fastened to Rover’s collar.
“He did not!” I said. “Mr. Jack Betts gave my sister this dog when he was a pup.”
“Well, don’t get mad!” the man said. “It might be I am mistaken. What will you take for the dog? I’ll give you a quarter for him.”
“He ain’t for sale,” I said.
“I’ll give you half a dollar.”
“No, he ain’t for sale.”
“Give you a dollar for him,” said the man, but I didn’t wait to have any more talk with him. I started back for our cottage.
Mr. Edwin Skreever was still walking up and down the porch and I sat down on the rocks. Wampus stood a minute or so, and then he reached into his pocket and took out a nail. He had a pocket half full of old, rusty nails he had knocked out of old driftwood—old iron nails, all sizes.
“Look here, Mr. Skreever,” he said, “can you do this?”
He took the nail, flat, between his thumb and two first fingers and threw it as hard as he could out over the river, making it spin, and it sang as it went. Whine is a better word; it whined like a guitar string when you pick it and then run your thumb up it.
“Did you ever hear anybody make a nail sing like that?” Wampus asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever, “I have. I have heard that before. And I cannot imagine why it is a boy delights in throwing away perfectly good nails for the mere satisfaction of hearing them make a useless noise. You may wish, some day, that you had not thrown away that nail.”
“Aw!” Wampus said.
“It is a useless and uncalled-for waste,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever. “Nails cost money. Nails cost labor and time. A miner must dig the iron ore, and another miner must dig coal, and laborers must turn the ore into iron and fashion the nails from the iron. Salesmen must go out and sell the nails, railroads must carry them, other salesmen must sell them again. And you throw them into the river! Why? What good does it do you?”
Wampus just said “Aw!” again, because he did not know what else to say, and I thought I was gladder than ever that I wasn’t going to marry Mr. Edwin Skreever. I was glad he was going to live in Derlingport and not in Riverbank. I don’t like fellows that lecture you when you throw away an old rusty nail. So I said to Wampus:
“Let’s eat a muskmelon.”
Well, all summer we had had a pile of muskmelons and watermelons under the cottage. They’re cheap and whenever we wanted to eat one we did. We used to get them by the skiff load. We would sit on the ripraps and eat and throw the rinds into the river, and the yellow-jacket hornets would come by the hundreds and pile all over any rinds that did not fall in the river. They would crowd onto any juice that fell on the rocks, and they would light on the very piece you were eating. There were lots of yellow-jackets, but nobody minded them. If they got in the way we flicked them off with a finger.
But there is one queer thing about yellow-jackets. They will buzz around and fly around all summer and never sting you unless, perhaps, you step on one with your bare foot, but there comes a day sooner or later when every yellow-jacket everywhere gets hopping mad. All the yellow-jackets for miles around go crazy on the same day. Maybe they all go crazy at the same hour of the same day—or the same minute—I don’t know. Anyway, this was the day. September 10th was the day the yellow-jackets quit being calm and gentle that year and began to be angry and go around with chips on their shoulders looking for a fight. So the first yellow-jacket Wampus flicked off him swore a blue streak in yellow-jacket language and buzzed in a circle to get up speed and banged right into Wampus’s neck. Zingo!
Wampus made one jump and grabbed his cap and slashed at the air and in a minute a dozen yellow-jackets were on the war-path. The next one to sting went at Rover’s nose like a shot out of a rifle. We heard poor Rover give one wild “Yeowp!” and he jumped about six feet in the air and when he came down he was already running. He went out of sight down the path, making about twenty feet at each jump and “yeowping” at the top of his voice, and his “yeowps” grew fainter and fainter. Mr. Edwin Skreever laughed, but I stood still, just holding my hat ready to swat any yellow-jacket that came too near me.
“Come on!” I said to Wampus, “let’s get away from here. It’s stinging time.”
So we gathered up the rest of our muskmelons and got away from there as quietly as we could. We went up to his cottage, which was all boarded up, and sat on the step.
Well, about six o’clock Orpheus Cadwallader came down from his shack to get our supper for us. He brought a spring chicken and fried it and we had a good supper, and then Wampus and I went out front. We fooled around awhile and Mr. Edwin Skreever lighted the lamp and wrote some letters or his will or something. It was none of our business what he wrote. Orpheus Cadwallader washed the dishes and then came out and said he was going to row down to town, and he went off in his skiff.
Then, presently, Wampus said:
“Where’s Rover?”
“Gosh!” I said, “I bet he’s wandering!”
“We’d better find him,” Wampus said, and I knew that was so.
I thought I knew where he would be, over back by the slough where there were some dogfish on the shore that would never swim again.
Mr. Edwin Skreever came out on the porch.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Rover ran away,” I said. “We’ve got to find him.”
“Oh, drat you and your Rover!” he said. “Didn’t May tell you not to let that dog run away? You certainly do aggravate me! For two cents I would go down to town now and be quit of your foolishness.”
I did not say anything but Wampus did.
“Why don’t you go, then?” he asked. “We wouldn’t care.”
So we went to find Rover. We worked back to the slough, calling him all the while—“Here, Rover! Here, Rover! Here, Rover!”—but not a yip nor bark from him. We went up the slough and down the slough calling him, and it began to get dark. Then, suddenly, Wampus stopped short.
“Say!” he said.
“What?”
“I know! That fellow got him—that red-headed fellow on the barge!”
“I bet he did!” I said.
Well, it seemed likely that that was what had happened. So Wampus and I stood there in the dark a minute.
“Well, we’ve got to get him,” I said. “I’m not going to have anybody steal my dog. Come on!”
We worked through the weeds and bushes, across toward the chute and down toward the two willow barges. We came out not far from them as we saw the red light the man had put on the barges as a signal. Then we crept along Indian fashion, bent over, toward the barges.
“He would put him inside,” Wampus said, and I knew that as well as Wampus did. That was what any dog-thief would do—put Rover down inside the barge and close the hatch cover. We crept close to the barges. I picked up a good-sized stone and so did Wampus.
Well, just as we got close up to the “U.S. 420” we heard Rover. We heard just one bark and then we saw a man lifting the hatch cover. The man slid down inside the barge and eased the cover back into place over his head, and then we heard no more barking. The cover was thick and heavy and I guess he wanted to shut in Rover’s barks while he was tying him fast.
“Come on!” I said, and the next minute I was on the barge and Wampus after me. Then I did not know what to do. We couldn’t yank up that cover and go down and take Rover away from the man, because he might kill us or something. But Wampus knew what to do.
“Here!” he said, and he tossed me a handful of his rusty nails. “Hurry up! Get busy! Nail this cover down!”
So we did. We used the two rocks as hammers and drove in the nails, and then we jumped for shore and ran, because we were frightened. We ran up the path and we did not stop until we were almost at our cottage.
“Gee!” I said then. “We did it! We’ve got him! But what are we going to do about it?”
“Do?” said Wampus. “We’ll get Mr. Edwin Skreever and Orpheus Cadwallader and have Orpheus take his shotgun, and we’ll have them pry off that cover and get your dog. That’s what we’ll do.”
“But Orpheus has gone to town.”
“Well, we’ll do it in the morning.”
That would have been all right, too, but just then the Bright Star came around the lower end of Buffalo Island and steered for the two barges. I went cold, I tell you! The only thing I could think of doing was to get Mr. Edwin Skreever, so we ran to our cottage and called and shouted, but he was not there. We guessed he had gone down to town as he had threatened to do, maybe, so we ran down the path to the barges. The men were already throwing off the cables. They were pretty cross, too, because they don’t like to work at night, and they wouldn’t listen to us. They told us to get away from there and they chased us. We had to stand and see the Bright Star tow the barges out into the river and away. We watched them until they were just dim red and green lights far down the river. Then we went back to the cottage.
We were scared, I tell you! We thought maybe that man would stay nailed down inside that barge until he starved to death and some day his bones would be found and we would be arrested and, maybe, hung. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we saw Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat tied in front of the cottage! He hadn’t gone down to town. Then we were scared! Ten times over!
We sat in the cabin until it was awful late, hoping Mr. Edwin Skreever was only out somewhere hunting Rover, but he did not come. We couldn’t fool ourselves. We knew we had nailed May’s bridegroom inside that barge and sent him down the river—nobody could tell how far, perhaps all the way to New Orleans! And the wedding was the next day!
Well, it was terrible! We tried to think that we had not done anything wrong—that we had only tried to keep our dog from being stolen—but it was no comfort. About midnight we heard the creak of Orpheus Cadwallader’s oars as he rowed home from town, but that did not comfort us much, either. We went to sleep right there in the living-room of the cottage, thinking what would happen to us the next day when the wedding-time came and there was no Mr. Edwin Skreever. I dreamed awful things all night, but the worst was a dream about May. She was all dressed up in her wedding clothes, with a white veil and flowers, and when it came time to be married, Mr. Edwin Skreever was not there, so she wept and wept. Mother and father were very stern and cross, and mother said, “Well, there is no help for it; you will have to marry Rover!” so they dragged Rover in, yowling and pulling back, and father and Mr. Smale held him up on his hind legs and then, all of a sudden, Rover gave a big wiggle and turned into a pile of rusty nails. Then May wept again, and in came Mr. Edwin Skreever, but he was nothing but bones—just plain skeleton bones. He pointed his bone finger at me and opened his bone face and I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t. He let out a noise like Mr. Jack Betts’s Skittery III.
That woke me up and, sure enough, I was hearing the noise of the Skittery III. It wakened Wampus, too, and we went to the door, rubbing our eyes. The Skittery III swung in toward our cottage and Mr. Jack Betts shut off her power and taxied in. He jumped ashore and climbed up the rocks.
“Hello, young fellows!” he said. “May and your folks sent me up; they’ve changed their minds—want you and Skreever to come down right away and not wait until noon.”
“Well—” I said. “Well; all right.”
“What’s all the welling about, son?” Mr. Jack Betts asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there isn’t going to be any wedding. I guess maybe Mr. Edwin Skreever won’t be there.”
“He isn’t here,” said Wampus.
Then I thought of something.
“Unless you would be the bridegroom,” I said to Mr. Jack Betts. “I guess May wouldn’t like to get all ready for a wedding and not have one. I guess, when she’s got her dress and the house all decorated and everything—”
“My word!” said Mr. Jack Betts, laughing. “What are you trying to do? Are you asking me to marry your sister?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“As a substitute? My word!”
“Well—well—” I said, and then he laughed again.
“What’s all this about Ed Skreever not being here and not being there and not being anywhere?” he asked.
So I told him and Wampus told him. We both told him at the same time. We told him how we had nailed Mr. Edwin Skreever into the hold of the barge “U.S. 420” and sent him down the river. We said we were sorry, but maybe the Bright Star would tow him all the way to New Orleans before he could get out. We told him the whole thing.
“My word!” he cried, when he could stop laughing. “My word! I wouldn’t have missed this for a million dollars; no, not for two million! For eight million dollars I would let the stuck-up fellow stay in the barge. I would for ten million dollars, anyway. But, no! I like May too much. We can’t have May ‘waiting at the church.’”
“It isn’t going to be at the church,” I said. “It is going to be at our house.”
Mr. Jack Betts looked at me then.
“George,” he said, “you are wonderful! You are just wonderful—no other word for it! Come on, you two boys; we’ll go get that interned bridegroom.”
Well, that was the only time I ever rode in the Skittery III, and I don’t know whether I want to ride in her again or not. I was scared every inch of the way—every single inch. It was like being shot out of a gun or something. Mr. Jack Betts certainly could make the Skittery III go! We skittered down the river and were past the town before I caught my breath and we were miles below town before I could breathe my breath after I caught it, and then there was the Bright Star lazying along twelve miles below town and Mr. Jack Betts shut off his gas and slid up alongside and told the captain what he had come for. The captain shouted to the pilot and he jingled a bell and the Bright Star backed water and half a dozen hands ran forward over the willows and pried off the hatch cover and out came Rover and Mr. Edwin Skreever.
“A nice business!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said bitterly. “A fine hole to be in! I’ll smell of tar all the rest of my days. But you young rascals will suffer for this—I promise you that!”
We thought we would, too.
“Oh, no, now, Edwin!” Mr. Jack Betts said. “Come, now! That’s no way to talk on your merry wedding morn. These boys meant no harm. Just forget it!”
“I’ll not!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said, even more bitterly.
“Well, of course,” said Mr. Jack Betts cheerfully, “I appreciate your feelings, but this boat of mine—this Skittery III—is such a peculiar boat. She won’t carry any but forgetful people. I did hope you were forgetful, Edwin, so I could take you aboard and skitter you back to town in a couple of minutes. But if you really want to stay on this barge—”
For a minute Mr. Edwin Skreever scowled at us all, and then he grinned.
“All right! I’ve forgotten,” he said.
We made a pretty heavy load for the Skittery III, but she skittered up past the town and up to Birch Island in no time at all. Then Mr. Edwin Skreever packed his things and Mr. Jack Betts skittered away and Mr. Edwin Skreever and Wampus and I went down to town in the motor-boat. Rover rode on the stern seat.
When we went up to our house, May was standing at the gate looking for us. She waved her hand as soon as she saw us, and when we reached the gate she took Mr. Edwin Skreever’s hand and said some soft stuff to him, and then she said:
“And you didn’t forget Rover, did you, Edwin?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t forget him. And I don’t believe I ever will.”
But you can see why I felt scared when it seemed likely that the red-headed man with the scar over his eye in the Arkansas jail was the Red-Headed Bandit. Because we knew the Red-Headed Bandit was a mighty hard character. Of course, when you come to think of it, he did not steal Rover, but he might have stolen him if he had thought of it and had wanted a dog like Rover.
CHAPTER X
THE TREASURE HUNT
The night after we had chased the Tough Customer and the Rat from Birch Island we had a meeting of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company in the shaft-house of the Five Friends’ Worm Mine. The Worm Mine was something we had started a few days earlier.
Everybody knows it is hardly worth while going fishing unless you have worms or minnows for bait. Minnows are the best bait, but they are hard to get and harder to keep, so nearly everybody uses worms. When everything is moist, you can dig worms almost anywhere on the island, but, when a dry spell comes on, the ground gets drier and drier, and the worms go down so deep that you can dig for an hour out back of the cottages and not get a worm. Then there is only one place on the island where you can get worms. That is in what we all called Mosquito Hollow. This year the worms went deep, and we had to try Mosquito Hollow for them.
Jibby was with us when we said we guessed we would have to try Mosquito Hollow for worms, and the minute we said it he sat down on a log of driftwood and closed his eyes and laid his finger alongside of his nose.
“What are you doing that for?” Wampus Smale asked him.
“For worms,” Jibby said.
“Trying to smell where they are?” Wampus asked, laughing at him.
“Maybe so,” Jibby Jones said. “I want to do my share when it comes to getting worms, and you know I can’t go to Mosquito Hollow. I wonder—”
“Why can’t you go to Mosquito Hollow?” Wampus asked.
“I might stand it if it wasn’t for my spectacles,” Jibby said. “The mosquitoes get in behind my spectacles and I can’t smack them. And then I swell up.”
This was true. Jibby always wore tortoise-shell rim spectacles, and he did swell up when a mosquito bit him.
“I’m ashamed to swell so much,” Jibby said, “but I can’t help it. I think perhaps my grandchildren won’t, if I ever have any grandchildren, because the swelling seems to be going out of our family. When I get a mosquito bite, it only swells as big as a walnut, but father’s and mother’s bites swell almost as big as apples, and my grandfather used to swell as big as a wash-basin. I don’t know how big a mosquito bite would have swelled on great-grandfather. But I wonder—”
“What do you wonder?” Wampus asked.
“I was just wondering if you could charm a worm by playing it a tune on a flute, the way people charm snakes,” Jibby said. “If we could, we might get a flute and charm some worms until they crawled out of their holes, no matter how deep the dry weather has sent them. But I never heard of charming worms with a flute.”
We laughed, but Jibby Jones was entirely serious. If he had ever heard, or read, of worms being charmed, he would have tried it because that was the way he was. But he hadn’t.
“No,” he said, “I don’t believe it would work. If it would work, Izaak Walton would have written it in his fishing book. I’ll have to think of some other way.”
“No, don’t you bother,” Tad said. “We’ll get the worms.”
So then we all said the same thing, because we knew how Jibby swelled up when mosquitoes bit him. Some folks do and some folks don’t, but Jibby does. And Mosquito Hollow is just about the worst mosquito place in the world.
The skeets are bad enough anywhere on Birch Island, because there are billions of them that come over from the ponds and sloughs, but in Mosquito Hollow it is as if all the mosquitoes in the world had gathered together in one place. A hundred skeets will get on your hand in a second and all start to bite at once.
Mosquito Hollow is the lowest ground on Birch Island and the dampest, and that is why there are always worms there, but it is why there are always skeets there, too. It is down near the end of the island, below all the real cottages. There is one old shack there, about as big as a playhouse, but nobody has lived in it for years—too many skeets, I guess. All around the hollow, and in it, the nettles grow as high as a man’s head and keep out the breeze, and the skeets just make it the metropolis of the whole skeet world. There are not so many in early spring, but by summer there are trillions of quadrillions, and the noise they make sounds like a sawmill.
“Don’t you bother, Jibby,” I said. “We’ll get worms for all of us.”
So Jibby went with us down the path along the river, but, when we got down near the old shack, he sat down on an elm root to think how to get worms without getting mosquito-bit, and the rest of us went back in through the nettles to get the worms. It was only a few yards, but the minute we got to the low ground the skeets were at us. All of us began slapping our necks and faces and hands and arms and whacking at our backs and ankles and legs, and jumping around and waving our arms.
We had our spades and tin cans and Wampus rammed the blade of his spade into the ground and then yelled and began slapping himself everywhere. Tad grabbed the handle of the spade and pushed down on it and turned up a chunk of soil, and then he began yelling and slapping himself. I kicked the clod of dirt with my foot and picked up one fat worm and put it in the can, and then I yelled and began to slap myself. And Skippy did not even pick up a single worm; he just yelled and slapped and then ran for the riverbank full tilt, dragging his spade after him, and we all followed him. It was no use; the skeets were too fierce, we couldn’t stand them.
Jibby Jones was sitting just where we left him, and we began scratching our ankles and rubbing our necks and faces and the backs of our hands, and saying, “Gee!” and “Whew!” and “Oh, boy!” on account of the bites.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come back,” Jibby Jones said.
“Well, we came back,” I said. “I guess we didn’t stay long enough for you to get homesick for us, did we?”
“I didn’t notice,” Jibby said. “I’ve been thinking. I think a person ought to think when he hasn’t anything else to do. I was thinking about fishworms, and I thought it wasn’t fair for you fellows to do all the work and get all the worms when I am going to use some of them.”
“Hah!” Wampus said. “I guess there aren’t going to be any worms. I wouldn’t go back to that hollow for a million dollars.”
“Mosquitoes?” asked Jibby. “And, of course they are worse for me.”
“Because you swell up when they bite you,” said Tad.
“Not only that, but there is more of me to bite,” said Jibby. “I got more exposed surface than you fellows. More face.”
That did not seem so, but he proved it was so.
“On account of my nose,” he said. “Wampus has hardly any nose—it is just a nubbin—but my nose is like the jib sail of a boat. It is like a big triangle sticking out from my face. If you measure across Wampus’s face, you’ve got all the surface mosquitoes can get at, because his nose doesn’t amount to much, but, when you measure across my face and come to the nose, you’ve got to measure my nose, too. You’ve got to measure the base and altitude and hypotenuse of my nose on one side, and then measure the base and altitude and hypotenuse of the other side of my nose, and it amounts to a lot. The mosquitoes have a whole lot more nose to bite on me than on any of the rest of you.”
We saw that was true and we said so.
“So I thought I had better think of a way to get all the fishworms we need without getting mosquito-bit,” said Jibby, “and I did.”
“How?” I asked him.
“Well,” said Jibby, “the best way is to have a worm mine and mine for them.”
“Mine for them!” Skippy yelled, laughing. “You go back into that hollow and try to mine! I dare you!”
“I wouldn’t want to do that,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “I didn’t think of doing that. I thought of mining in the old shack over yonder. It has a dirt floor and it has screens over the windows and at the door. I thought we could go into the shack and close the screen door and sink a shaft there, and then tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow and get the worms. I don’t suppose a worm cares whether you dig down to get him or tunnel up under him to get him. I never heard so.”
Well, of course, Jibby was joking about whether worms cared how we got them, but as soon as he mentioned a worm mine, we all wondered why we had never thought of one. When you come to think of it, a worm mine is the only sensible way to get worms from a place where the mosquitoes practically eat you alive. You are down under the ground where the skeets can’t get at you, and you are down where the biggest and best worms are, and you have your mine, and any time you need fishworms you can go into the mine and dig a little worm-ore and get the worms out of it.
Almost before Jibby was through talking, we were making a rush for the old shack. The screens were fair to middling at the door and windows—good enough, anyway, even if they were rusty—and in a minute Tad had marked out the size of the shaft we ought to sink. He scratched it on the hard earth of the floor with his spade. But Jibby wasn’t there with us. We were so excited that we did not notice, at first, that he was not with us, but about the time when we began to try to dig the hard earth of that floor he came in bringing a regular ditch-digger’s pick. It was just what we needed. Jibby always did think of everything.
Well, the worm mine was a big success. We took turns digging the shaft, some of us digging and some of us looking for worms in the dirt we dug out and some of us carrying the dirt out of the shack and dumping it. The dirt we got out of the shaft was pay-dirt, but it did not assay very heavy in worms; it was low-grade ore and the worms ran small to middling.
We talked a good deal while we worked, and we decided to call the mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine. We got so interested in mining worms and in making it a first-class mine that we forgot all about fishing. It was bully to think that we were probably the first worm miners the world ever knew, and that this was the only worm mine in the world. So, from then on, whenever we wanted worms, we went down to the shack and mined some. And that was what the Five Friends’ Worm Mine was, and that old shack was the “shaft-house” where we met to talk over the plans of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company.
We began planning while it was daylight, but before we were through we had lighted our lanterns.
First of all, Jibby unpinned the map from inside his hat and spread it out on the bottom of an old tin bucket. If the paper wasn’t old, it looked old, and was stained and yellow. The whole map wasn’t much bigger than my hand. First, we looked at the back of it, and there was the word “Riverbank” written as plain as could be. Then Jibby turned the map over. We all leaned over and looked at it.
The map was exactly as the Tough Customer had explained it to the Rat. There was the river marked “river,” and the slough, and the creek emptying into the slough, and the crossroads, and the house, and the “X” where the treasure was probably buried, and the arrow pointing north. There was the “2-3 miles” and the “Greenland.”
“That’s it, all right!” Wampus said. “That’s just about the way the creek comes into Greenland Slough, and just about the way Greenland Slough comes into the river. And look where the ‘X’ is. A straight line across the back of the square that stands for the house would go right spang to that ‘X.’ That’s where the treasure is, sure! Unless it is where the head of the arrow points, where the creek crosses the road.”
Jibby drew a deep, solemn breath, if you can call a breath solemn. He looked at us with something like awe in his eyes.
“Boys,” he said, “this is the real map! Whoever drew it, and whatever it was drawn for, this is a real land pirate map. Because that’s not an arrow. That’s a pine tree—a signal pine tree; that’s a John A. M’rell signal pine!”
As soon as Jibby said it, we all wondered why we hadn’t known it from the first minute. It looked like a pine tree, once anybody said so, and it was in the corner of the lot, where all the John A. Murrell signal pines were.
We were all excited, and we wished it was the next day, so we could get to hunting the treasure, but Jibby Jones just stared at the map and turned it one way and another. By and by he said:
“Have any of you ever been up there at Greenland?”
We all had, and we told him so. He asked what the store and post-office were like, and we told him the store was the post-office, and that it was an old frame building, painted white, with a big porch in front and a roof over the porch, and usually some boxes and barrels on the porch. Close back of the store was a shed, open toward the store, where some lumber, and lime in barrels, and cement in bags, and drain tile, and bales of hay, and barrels of salt, and so on, were stored. And alongside of the shed was a big red barn, with old wagons and empty boxes and barrels and the usual store litter scattered in the yard the three buildings made.
“The shed and the barn don’t show on the map,” Jibby said.
“No. Maybe they were built later, after the map was made,” Skippy said, and Jibby thought that might be so.
“I’ve been thinking how we want to go at this job,” he said. “It seems to me we want to go up the river in the motor-boat, and up the slough until we come to the mouth of the creek. Then we’ll leave the motor-boat and tramp up the creek. When we come to where the creek crosses the road that runs down toward the slough, one of us will go up the road, and the others will continue up the creek to about where the ‘X’ mark is on the map. If I’m the one that goes up the road, I’ll stop when I come to the rear end of the Greenland store, so I can sight along the end of it. Then, when you come to about where the ‘X’ mark is, one of you stand a spade straight up. I’ll sight along the rear of the store and motion to the left with my hand if the spade is too far to the right, or to the right if the spade is too far to the left. That way you’ll find the exact spot.”
That was fine; nobody but Jibby Jones would have thought of it. So we decided we would do it that way.
The next morning we tuned up Wampus’s motor-boat and saw that she had gas, and each of us got a lunch, and we started for Greenland Slough bright and early. We had spades and an old pickaxe, and a good stout gunnysack to put the treasure in. The sun was bright and the river just a little choppy with a brisk cool breeze, and it was all fine and exciting and glorious. The boat went along at a good speed, and before long we were running close to the shore on the Illinois side just below the mouth of Greenland Slough.
Jibby took the map out of his hat and looked at it.
“This is all right,” he said. “Now we know the only thing about this map we didn’t know before. Now we know what these criss-cross scribble marks below the mouth of the slough mean. They mean swamp. It’s as if whoever made the map had said, ‘If you come for the treasure, don’t land here, it’s swamp.’”
So we swung into the slough and ran up toward the mouth of the creek, and the first thing we saw was smoke. It came from one of the banks of the creek, but the fire it came from was hidden by willows. It wasn’t until we reached the creek that we saw a skiff fastened to one bank of the creek, and on the shore close by a fire with a tin pail hung over it, and the Tough Customer and the Rat sitting on a log eating out of a pan.
The minute they saw us, they jumped up, and the Tough Customer grabbed a spade and the Rat grabbed a club. Wampus swung the motor-boat out toward the middle of the slough and we went by and on up the slough.
“What do you know about that!” Skippy said. “They’re here already!”
We could hear them crashing through the willows and driftwood as they came running along the bank of the slough, and Wampus put on a little more speed.
“Did you see anything that looked like treasure?” Tad asked.
We hadn’t, any of us. But we hadn’t noticed much of anything.
“How far does this slough run before it comes into the river again?” Jibby asked.
We told him three or four miles, and that the motor-boat could get through to the river that way, because this slough was not dammed at the head.
“Speed up, Wampus,” Jibby said. “We will get out into the river, and hasten back down below the mouth of the slough, and below the swamp. Can we walk back to the hills below the swamp?”
We all thought so, although we had never tried it, so we ran on up the slough and out into the river, and chugged back to where the swamp below the slough ended. We left the motor-boat there and struck inland.
It was a tough trip. First, we had to climb five or six feet of steep mud bank, and that brought us to a thicket of willows and weeds and trees and grapevines that we had to fight through inch by inch, pushing them aside and climbing over and dodging under. Then this opened onto a blind slough—a slough that closed at both ends when the river fell in the spring—and we had to work down-river a half-mile or so until we came to a place where there was no water and the surface of the mud had dried and cracked into big bent cakes. We crossed there and fought through more thicket and came out into a forest of water-maples and water-elms. The river had been over this in the spring, and there was half a mile or so of stinging nettles, shoulder high, and great rifts of driftwood. We couldn’t walk in a straight direction more than twenty feet at a time; we had to go around piles of driftwood, or around mud holes, or pools, or places where the ground was like mush. Forty times we went in over the tops of our shoes, but by and by we came to a huge big cornfield that had been planted after the water had fallen. We walked between the rows of corn, and as we went the land got higher and higher until it began to slant up fairly steep, and then the cornfield ended and we were at the foot of the hills.
The hills here rounded upward and were grassy and not very bad walking, and we got to the top. We were just back of a farmhouse, and we edged along the farm fence, up-river toward the Greenland crossroad, and then struck inland until we hit the hilltop road. We walked along that until we came to the Greenland store.
Right away we saw that the map did not exactly jibe with the things we saw. In the first place, the store was not as far back from the crossroad as the map showed it to be; it was so close to the crossroad that you could step off the porch into the road. And there was no signal pine there, because there was no room for one. We sat down by the side of the road to have a look at the map.
Jibby left us there looking at the map while he walked down the crossroad. In a couple of minutes he came back.
“Well,” he said, “this isn’t a road at all. It is just a sort of driveway alongside of this store, and, as soon as it dips down the hill, it ends in a swampy pasture, and beyond the pasture the hill drops so sharply that no road could go down it, and no road ever did go down it. And I’ll tell you another thing. Every nail in every board in this store is a wire nail, and there were no wire nails in 1835. This isn’t the place. This store has been built since then. We’ve got to go farther up the hill road.”
“Why?” Wampus asked. “Maybe the place is back in the direction we came from.”
“No, because the ‘X’ mark was on the creek, and we haven’t crossed the creek yet. We’ll go on up the road until we come to the creek.”
We were pretty tired, but we went on up the road. We went about half a mile before we came to the creek. It went under the road through a big tile culvert almost the size of a man. But there was no crossroad anywhere near there, and no house, and no sign of a pine tree. There was a barbed-wire fence and a cornfield where the house and the tree should have been.
“No good!” I said.
But Jibby Jones had spread himself flat on the ground alongside the barbed-wire fence, and he hunched along until he was against the lowest wire, almost, and then he held it as high as he could and hunched under. He got up and disappeared in the cornfield, and we sat down and waited. A farmer drove by, and asked us if we were after woodchucks when he saw our spades, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
And then we heard Jibby Jones, off in the cornfield, calling “Hi-hoo! Hi-hoo!” and we hunched under the barbed wire and hurried through the corn to where he was.
CHAPTER XI
WHERE IS GREENLAND?
There was no doubt in our minds what Jibby Jones had found when we pushed through the corn and came to where he was. The corn grew close up to its edges, but it was a cellar, as plain as anything could be. The cellar wall had been made of creek stones, piled up, and it had mostly crumbled inward, half filling the cellar and, on top of the stones, brush and trash, and old tin boilers and tin cans, and a couple of bedsprings and some old rusted barbed wire had been dumped, but there were four or five ends of squared logs, burned down to the ends, and we guessed what had happened to that house—it had burned down.
The cellar was small, not over ten feet square, and we judged the house had been small—maybe an old log cabin and maybe not—but it had been a house, and it was near the creek and near the hill road, and it was the only sign of a house Jibby had been able to find.
“I couldn’t find the crossroad, nor a sign of it,” Jibby said. “And there’s no sign of a signal pine. But over yonder is the creek, and this must have been the house, if the whole map wasn’t just a fake and a fooler. This is the only place that could be Greenland.”
“Well,” I said, “away back in the good steamboat days there was a lot more Greenland than this is. Only it wasn’t up here on the hill; it was down at the bottom of the hill and over toward the river. I’ve heard folks talk about it more than once, because in those days Greenland was bigger than Riverbank—it had ten or twelve houses and Riverbank had only eight or nine—and Greenland thought it was going to be the biggest city west of New York. The steamers stopped here for wood, because they all burned wood. But when coal came, the big steamers stopped coming here, and then the railroad went down the other side of the river, and Greenland busted. There wasn’t any more Greenland.”
So Jibby got out the map again and studied it.
“I don’t think this is the place,” he said suddenly.
“Why not, Jibby?” we asked him.
“Come here and I’ll show you,” he said.
He walked straight down a corn row to the place where the corn ended and the ground fell off sudden into the creek.
“Does that look like a place to hide treasure or anything else?” he asked, and we said it did not. “Then count my steps,” he said.
He paced off, taking as long steps as he could, the distance to the ruined cellar, and it made fifty paces.
“Now,” he said, “on this map the house is about halfway between the creek and the road. The road ought to be fifty paces west of the house. Count my steps.”
He paced off fifty steps.
“This is where the pine tree ought to be, but it isn’t here,” he said. “But we won’t worry about that; it may have been cut down and the roots grubbed up. But if there was ever a road here, where the map says it was, it ought to run east of north. That would be in this direction.”
He led us through the corn in the direction the map showed the road should have gone. Nothing but corn! So we came to the edge of the hill, looking off over the bottomland and the slough and the river. We saw in a minute that no road could have gone down that hill—it was so steep you might call it a bluff. Jibby pulled out the map and showed it to us.
“Look where the creek runs on the map, back of the house,” he said. “It was fifty paces from the side of the house to the creek, and by the map it would be about fifty paces to the creek from the back of the house, because the creek turns and runs back of the house. Where is your creek?”
Well, there was no creek! If that creek had run where the map said it ran, it would have had to balance itself in the air ten paces out beyond the edge of the hill.
“All very well!” said Jibby. “Now look down below there. Follow the creek from where it comes down the hill to where it goes into the slough.”
We saw our mistake then, or thought we did. The turn of the creek was not up on the hill at all; it was down there in the bottomland. We could trace it as plain as day, because it was edged thick with willows. And, as we stood there looking at the place where the creek made its turn toward the west, we heard a noise of “chuck! chuck! chuck!” It was a spade chucking into soft soil. The Tough Customer and the Rat were there ahead of us!
Well, there wasn’t anything for us to do but go home and let our treasure-hunting go for that day. We couldn’t go down there and fight the Tough Customer and the Rat, and we had no right to, because they had got to the place first. And we would not have fought them, anyway. A bunch of boys can’t drive away two desperate characters in any such way. So we sat on the hill awhile and listened to the Tough Customer and the Rat digging away, and then we got up and started for home. And it was time, anyway, because we had that long fight through the bottomland to get back to our motor-boat.
On the way back to the boat we talked a lot about what we could do and what we couldn’t do, and we rested a lot and fooled around a lot, and the sun was getting low when we got back to the boat. And the first glance at the boat showed that some one had been there; some one had whacked the motor with an axe or a spade until it looked mighty much like a heap of junk.
“The Tough Customer!” Wampus said, as mad as a hatter, and we all thought the same, but there was no way to prove it. The only thing we could do was to get into the boat and shove it into the current and float down home the best we could, urging the boat toward our shore with the oars. It was dark when we got home, and we were mighty tired and hungry, and the first person we saw was Wampus’s father. He was standing on the ripraps waiting for us.
“About time!” he said. “I came up with Parcell and I’ve been waiting two hours for you to get home so you could run me back to town. What’s the matter with the boat?”
“It’s busted,” Wampus said.
“Can’t you fix it?” his father asked.
“No; it’s too badly busted,” Wampus told him. “It’ll have to be mended down in town. I guess maybe it’ll cost thirty or forty dollars.”
Mr. Smale did not like that a bit.
“Very well, my son!” he said. “If that’s the case, that boat will remain ‘busted’ until you earn the money to have it mended. I’ve paid for repairing that boat as many times as I intend to. You are old enough to take care of that boat properly now, and it is your property. I’m through with it.”
We all felt pretty sick. There wasn’t much use thinking of doing more treasure-hunting unless we had the motor-boat to go up-river in.
Jibby was the first to say anything as we walked toward our cottages.
“It appears to me,” he said in his solemn way, “that it is not right to let Wampus pay for repairing that boat. The boat was being used by the Land Pirate Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and the Company ought to pay for the repairs.”
“Sure!” I said, laughing. “And how much money has the Company got to pay with?”
We counted up, and we had three dollars and sixty-seven cents. The part of it I had was the seven cents.
“I didn’t mean exactly that,” Jibby said. “I meant that the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company ought to earn the money to pay for repairing the boat.”
“By finding treasure?” I asked, as sarcastic as anything.
“Why, no,” Jibby said, without a smile. “I did not mean that. I was thinking the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company might mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and get the money that way.”
You couldn’t beat Jibby Jones when it came to thinking of things.