XXIII + 

Treasure Trove + 

The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in the creek by the explosion was rather muddy, but it was wet, and it was fun to think we were swimming in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was like discovering a new ocean or something. + 

Wampus put down the can of kerosene. + 

“Come on out,” he said. “If we are going to dig for that land pirate’s treasure today, we had better be burning out the bumblebees and getting at it. Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. He wanted to know what we were going to do with the kerosene, and I had to tell him, and he’s going to make us give him half of all we find.” + 

“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” I wanted to know, for I didn’t think Bill Catlin or anybody else had a right to any of that treasure when Jibby had been the only one to think of it being there, and when we had planned so hard to get it. + 

“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said. + 

And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the creek bank and looked down at us getting into our clothes. + 

“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we find enough to make us all rich and happy all the rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll get busy.” + 

Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and deliberate as if he had all day to do it in, and right there I made a mistake. I ought to have kept my mouth shut until Jibby had his clothes on and his spectacles on and was ready to talk, because that is always the safe thing to do. But I had to say my say. + 

“We don’t need any help,” I said. “We don’t want to divide this with anybody. Jibby Jones thought of the treasure being here, and it is going to be ours⁠—all of it.” + 

“That so?” Bill Catlin asked. “How about treasure trove, my son?” + 

“What do you mean?” I asked. + 

“All I mean,” said Bill Catlin, grinning, “is that it seems to me I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a law of treasure trove, and that half of any hidden treasure that is found on any man’s land belongs to the man that owns the land.” + 

“All right!” I said, quick. “That settles it. Wampus’s father owns this land and you don’t.” + 

“I lease it,” said Bill Catlin. “I rent it of Wampus’s father. As I look at it, that gives me everything that is on the land or in the land. Why, I could order Wampus’s father off this land if I wanted to, or the whole lot of you, for that matter. I could sue you for trespass this very minute, if I wanted to, for coming on this land. Sure, I could! I guess that makes me even better than the owner. I guess it entitles me to half the treasure we find.” + 

What Bill Catlin said took all the wind out of my sails in a second. There was one sail it did not take the wind out of, though; that was the jib on Jibby Jones’s face⁠—the nose he called his jib sail. Jibby was hitching up his trousers as if Bill Catlin or nothing in the world mattered a cent. + 

“Is that so, Jibby?” Tad Willing asked. + 

“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in his slow way, “and he can sue us for trespass if we don’t go. I know that, because once, when father was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in Arizona, the man that owned the farm ordered father off and father did not want to go. So the man hit father on the head with a club, and father sued him for damages, and the justice of the peace made the man pay father five dollars for hitting him, and made father pay the man five dollars for trespassing, and neither of them had five dollars.” + 

“What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Catlin. + 

“No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace lent father five dollars and father paid the man with it, and then the man paid father with it, and then father paid it back to the justice of the peace. Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope that will be a lesson to both of you. You have got off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I would have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, and I haven’t got but eight dollars and sixty cents, so where would you have been then?’ ” + 

Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby Jones right away, because laughing and liking are always close together. + 

“I bet they would have gone to jail, just because they lacked a little common sense,” Bill Catlin said. “If I had been there, I could have fixed it up easy. I would have had your father borrow the eight dollars and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your father would have owed him only one dollar and forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay the money back to your father and the man would have owed your father only one dollar and forty cents. Then your father would have given the eight dollars and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t have owed him anything. And then all your father would have had to do would have been to borrow one dollar and forty cents from the justice, and when it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would have been paid. Nobody would have owed anybody anything. Your father and the man could have paid each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to use common sense.” + 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely. + 

It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-looking boy with tortoiseshell spectacles take what he said so seriously, and he was mighty tickled. + 

“You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I can see that,” he said to Jibby, which wasn’t saying anything very nice to us, as I looked at it, but we didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going to talk again. + 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby said, as if he was pleased to have Bill Catlin compliment him that way. “I do try to know something; I find it comes in handy sometimes. I think it is better than just thinking you know something. My father says so. My father says it is foolish to read in a story book that a man made a trip to the moon and then to think you know that a man did make a trip to the moon; my father says it is better to find out the true facts first.” + 

“And your father knows what he is talking about,” Bill Catlin said. + 

“Yes, sir,” said Jibby Jones meekly; and then he added, in the same meek way, “What book did you read about treasure trove in, Mr. Catlin?” + 

Well, Bill Catlin sort of looked at Jibby as if he hadn’t seen him before. He stared at him. Then he got red in the face. + 

“What did you ask that for?” he wanted to know. + 

“Because in the books I read,” Jibby said, “I couldn’t find anything about halves and halves when you find treasure. Of course,” he added, “I only read some encyclopædias and law books and things like that, as anybody would when they start out to dig for treasure. I don’t believe even the biggest book weighed over ten pounds, and only a part of that one was about hidden treasure, so maybe what I think I know don’t amount to much.” + 

Then Bill Catlin asked him what he had found in the books, and Jibby said that “treasure trove” meant any gold or silver or money found hidden in the ground or in any private place, the ownership of which was unknown. In England, Jibby said, the treasure that was found belonged to the king and not to the finder, but, if the owner was known or was discovered later, the treasure belonged to the owner, and not to the king or the finder at all, and if the finder kept it or hid it he could be jailed. + 

“You don’t mean it!” Bill Catlin exclaimed. + 

“Yes, sir; that’s what the books say,” Jibby said. “And in the United States there isn’t any such thing as treasure trove at all. When anything is found on the land, it belongs to the man that finds it, unless he knows the true owner, and then it belongs to the true owner, just as if it was a cow or a suit of clothes or a bushel of apples.” + 

“Then I don’t come in at all, hey?” Bill Catlin said. + 

“No, sir,” Jibby said, “but all we have found so far is an old 1804 dollar.” + 

“Oh, I don’t want that,” said Bill Catlin carelessly. He was very much disappointed; I guess he had expected to get fifty thousand dollars, maybe. “Well,” he said, “I’ll go along and help you burn out the bees, anyway.” + 

We were all ready to start then, and Wampus picked up the can of kerosene and waded across the creek, and Tad and Skippy Root and I followed him. Jibby sort of waited for Bill Catlin while Bill slid down the bank, and just then we heard voices of men. The men were coming up the creek, and we knew them by their voices. They were the Jim and Jake and the rest that had been up the creek before⁠—the tough customers that had come all the way from Arkansas to hunt for the Murrell treasure. They were coming back. + 

I ran up the bank of the creek in a hurry, and so did Wampus and Tad and Skippy. I thought sure there was going to be trouble if those men caught us, and I looked through the trees toward the road, all ready to run for it. What I saw made me look twice. + 

“Gee whiz!” I said. “Look there, will you!” + 

It was enough to make anyone look. What Wampus had said to his folks must have leaked out, or something, for it looked as if every man and boy in Riverbank was coming up the road toward the dead pine to dig for that land pirate’s treasure. It looked like ten thousand, but I guess it was only about a thousand men and boys. There were old men that could hardly walk, and boys that were so young they could hardly walk, and middle-aged men, and even a few women and some girls, and they all had spades or picks or shovels. There were plenty of boys⁠—dozens of them. And our old friend, the Tough Customer tramp, was right there in the front of them all. + 

I was still looking when Jibby Jones and Bill Catlin climbed the bank to where they could see that great army of treasure-hunters coming up the road. Jibby was talking to Bill Catlin, telling him who the men were that were coming up the creek, and the minute he saw the crowd on the road he thought of something. None of the rest of us would have thought of it, but Jibby did. + 

“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “just look at that crowd! They’re coming to dig for treasure, and I shouldn’t wonder if all the rest of Riverbank came next. It is like a rush to the gold fields, or to the oil fields. Everybody that can come is coming. Why don’t you make some money out of it?” + 

“Money? I’m always glad enough to make money,” said Bill Catlin, “but how can I make money out of that crowd?” + 

“You can’t out of all of them,” Jibby said, “but you can out of some of them. You could make, anyway, a dollar apiece out of a lot of them. It’s the kind of treasure trove we can go half and half on. You have a right to keep all the people off this part of your farm, and you have a right to charge them a dollar apiece for letting them come on it and dig for treasure. If you say so Wampus and George and Skippy and Tad will do the collecting. We’ll collect a dollar apiece and give you half of it.” + 

Bill Catlin thought it over and said: + 

“All right; that’s a go.” + 

By that time the seven pirate money-hunters had come up the creek and were climbing the bank to where we were. They looked mean, too. The one called Jim, who was the old land pirate’s great-grandson, came right up to us and said: + 

“Look here! Are you the folks that blew up our stuff? We don’t stand for any business like that. You hadn’t any right to do it, and for half a cent we’d light into you and break you into pieces and chew you up. Now, we’ve got business here and we want you to get away from here and stay away.” + 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby Jones said in his solemn way. “Maybe we will. We didn’t know you owned this farm. We thought Wampus Smale’s father owned it, and that Mr. Catlin here rented it. We thought that anybody that came on the farm without Mr. Catlin’s permission was trespassing and could be put in jail or something. Why, look at all the people!” + 

The man named Jim climbed up the bank and looked. He swore. + 

“What’s that crowd?” + 

“They’re going to hunt for some old land pirate’s treasure, I guess,” Jibby said. “I guess they think there is some of it hidden around here somewhere. But Mr. Catlin thought we would charge them a dollar apiece for letting them hunt it. We didn’t know you owned this land.” + 

“A dollar, hey?” said the land pirate’s great-grandson. “Well, we’ll give you a dollar apiece⁠—seven dollars for the seven of us⁠—if that’s what you want.” + 

“Thank you,” Jibby said very politely, and, while the land pirate’s great-grandson was counting out the money, he told Wampus and Skippy and Tad and Mr. Catlin and me to go and stop the crowd and tell them it cost a dollar a day to hunt land pirate’s treasure on this farm. “And tell them to look out for the bumblebees,” he said. “We wouldn’t like the whole of Riverbank to get all stung up when all they are doing is trying to get the treasure before we get it.” + 

So Bill Catlin and all us boys but Jibby ran toward the crowd to tell them, and one of the first men we saw was the sheriff. We boys did not know him very well, but Bill Catlin did, and he went up to him and warned him that coming on the farm was trespass and that he looked to the sheriff to warn everybody and to keep off himself. + 

The sheriff hated it, but he had to do it, because it was his duty. He turned and held up both hands, to stop the crowd. + 

“But you can tell them,” Bill Catlin said, just before the sheriff spoke up, “that they can come on the farm and hunt treasure for one dollar each per day.” + 