“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 motorboat.
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 someone had been there; someone 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;
