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 tortoiseshell 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 washbasin. 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 motorboat, and up the slough until we come to the mouth of the creek. Then we’ll leave the motorboat 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 motorboat 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 crisscross 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 motorboat 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 motorboat 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 motorboat 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 downriver 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, upriver 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.