XIII
The Viking Ship
In a little while we had every old tin can on the island filled with worms and choice crumbly black earth in which they would be well and hearty and feel comfortable and at home. Then we began filling old pails, and wash-pitchers with the handles off, and boxes, and were fussing a little about who would go on the road and travel from town to town selling worms for the Five Friends’ and taking winter orders for spring delivery. We decided that Jibby would be the best salesman because he looked serious-minded and truthful with his big nose and tortoiseshell rimmed spectacles, but we decided he would have to wear a brand-new suit of clothes and carry a cane.
We decided that the Best Quality Five Friends’ worms should have a label with a black bass on it, and that the Prime Quality label should have a pickerel picture, and the Family Quality a picture of a perch or a goggle-eye. We decided all those details. Skippy wanted to have “None genuine without this signature” printed on the label, but we gave that up because there were five of us and it would crowd the label to have five signatures; and Wampus wanted to advertise in all the magazines and on the billboards and in all the streetcars, but we did not decide to do it. We decided to let that wait a while.
Jibby did not talk much. He dug and picked worms and timbered the gallery and carried out dirt, but something was bothering him. We thought he would mention it when he got ready, but he didn’t, so we asked him.
“Water,” he said. “I’m worrying about water. What are we going to do if the mine floods?”
“If the mine floods?” Wampus said, stopping work.
We all stopped work and looked at Jibby, because we all knew that a flooded mine is a dead mine and can’t be worked until pumps are rigged up and the water pumped out. And nearly every spring the whole lower end of Birch Island is flooded, and it is a rare spring when Mosquito Hollow is not. Just about as sure as spring came, our whole mine would be under water.
“But that’s not what worries me,” Jibby said. “It is these streaks of sand we have run into here and there. The whole island won’t have to be flooded to flood our mine; as soon as the water in the river rises a little, it will begin to seep through that sand and flood the mine. Then our mine is gone. No more worm mining.”
Well, the flood came, but not in the way we expected. Wampus was working at the end of the tunnel one day, digging out worm ore with his pick, and Tad and Skippy were carrying it to the shaft, and me and Jibby were hoisting it up in baskets and refining the worms out of it, when Wampus shouted to us that he had struck a tree-trunk. He shouted back through the tunnel to us that it was right across the tunnel and that he would have to have an axe to chop it away, or he would have to tunnel around it.
The tunnel was just about big enough for two boys to crawl through on hands and knees together, so Tad took our electric torch and crawled in. He and Wampus scraped more dirt away, and then came crawling out, and you bet they were excited.
“It ain’t a tree-trunk at all,” Tad said. “It’s the side of a boat—an oak boat—and it is bound with iron bands, and I’ll bet I know what it is. It’s an old viking ship. It’s a great find! I’ll bet we can dig it out and sell it to a museum for a million dollars or something.”
“Sure!” Wampus said. “An old viking ship would be worth that. I bet the vikings from Norway or somewhere sailed over to America hundreds of years before Columbus did, and discovered the Mississippi, and got shipwrecked on this island, or maybe the Indians killed them, and the river dumped sand and dirt on their ship and covered it up and preserved it. Who knows the name of a museum that would be likely to buy a viking ship?”
“I do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I wouldn’t spend the money you expect to get for that ship yet. No! Because I never heard of viking ships sailing up the Mississippi.”
“That makes it all the rarer,” Wampus said. “You go in and look at it yourself.”
So Jibby took the torch and crawled in, and I crawled in after him, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus crawled after us. Jibby felt the ship and so did I. It was oak, sure enough, and rounded like a ship’s hull, but in a minute Jibby laughed.
“It’s not a ship,” he said; “it’s a barrel. I guess it’s an old barrel the river floated in here and covered up. Give me the pick.”
I handed him the pick, and Jibby sat back and gave the barrel a whack with one of the points of the pick, and the pick stuck fast. The point of the pick went through the oak of the barrel and stuck in the hole it made. So Jibby sort of raised up and put his weight on the pick handle and pulled, and all at once the whole side of the barrel seemed to give and the oak staves cracked and out poured—molasses!
The first big gush of it went on Jibby and in his lap, and then I got my share, and we both shouted and scrambled to our hands and knees to get away from there, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus did not know what had happened, but were plenty frightened and tried to get away, and they got tangled up and jammed in the tunnel like a cork down a bottle neck, and nobody could get out. Except the molasses.
The molasses poured out. In about half a minute we were in a regular river of it and all of us covered with it.
“Go on out! Go on out!” I shouted, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy were pushing and pulling each other, and shouting, and then I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was funny—five of us stuck in the molasses like flies. It was the first time I ever heard of a mine being flooded with molasses. Then we all began to laugh, except Jibby Jones, and he said, as solemn as ever:
“I think we will get the reward.”
That was like him. Even when he was down in a worm mine stuck in a flood of molasses, he was always thinking ahead.
Well, we did get the reward. It turned out that the men that stole the barrels of molasses had buried them there in Mosquito Hollow, thinking they were hard cider. They thought they would leave it there until it was safe to take it somewhere and sell it.
When we went up to the cottages, Wampus’s mother was on her porch, and when she saw how soiled we were she said:
“Well! You are a sweet lot, aren’t you!”
But she didn’t know how sweet we really were.
Mr. Root laughed and laughed when he saw us and heard that we had discovered the stolen molasses, and he paid us the reward and said it was worth it to see five boys molassesed up that way, and I guess it was.
We don’t know who did it, but the next morning, when we went to the mine to see how bad the wreck was, somebody had changed the sign we had put on the shack door. It said, now: “Five Sweet Friends’ Worm and Molasses Mine. Keep Out!”
With the reward money and what we got for as many worms as we sold—which were not very many—we had Wampus’s motorboat mended, and the first trip we took in it was up the river. We ran into Greenland Slough, and the first thing that hit our eyes was that old shanty-boat, and the Tough Customer sitting on the narrow deck, fishing in the slough, with a can of worms beside him.
As the motorboat came closer, the Rat poked his head out of the door of the shanty-boat and began to curse and swear like a regular pirate. The Tough Customer turned and gave him an ugly look and told him to shut up and hold his mouth. Then he called to us, and Wampus ran the motorboat in close.
“Say, you fellers!” the Tough Customer called. “Looky here; I want to talk to you.”
“Well, what is it?” Wampus asked.
“I just want to tell you something,” the Tough Customer said. “If you got a piece of paper that fell off’n this boat when that fat feller whacked the end mighty near off’n this boat, you’d better hand it over here and now, because me and my pardner ain’t going to stand no more foolishness. That’s our paper, and, if you don’t hand it over, we’re going to have the law on you, and maybe jail you; so hand it over while you got the chance.”
Jibby Jones looked at the Tough Customer through his tortoiseshell spectacles.
“My gracious!” he said, as solemn as an old owl. “I would not like to be put in jail for stealing! Not in some jails, at any rate. What jail would we be put in, do you suppose? Do you think it would be the one at Helena, Arkansas?”
The Tough Customer glared at Jibby—that’s the only word for it. Then he worked his jaws and pointed his finger at Jibby and sputtered, but he was so mad he couldn’t say a word, and Jibby leaned over and accelerated the motorboat, and we swung around and went scooting down the slough, with the exhaust snapping like a machine gun.
“That’s all right, anyway,” Jibby said. “We know one thing; they haven’t found the treasure yet. If they had, they wouldn’t care who had the map.”