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 motorboat to go upriver 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.
XII
The Worm Mine
The next morning we all went down to the shaft-house, which was the old shack near Mosquito Hollow, and set to work in the worm mine. Jibby’s idea was that we should mine some first-class worms and then set a trotline in the river and bait it with the worms, and twice a day we would “run” the trotline and get the fish. Then we would sell the fish to our folks and to the other families on our island. And, every day when we were not running the trotline, we would be catching fish with poles, and we would sell those fish, too. And before the summer was over, we would, maybe, have enough money to have Wampus’s motorboat mended.
Well, I don’t know how that would have worked out, because we did not raise the money that way. We got it by solving the mystery of the stolen cider that we had heard the Rat talking to the Tough Customer about. But the credit belongs to Jibby Jones—I guess you will see that.
It was Skippy Root’s father that offered the reward, because the barrels were his barrels. They had been stolen from his wholesale grocery house down in Riverbank.
The reward was twenty-five dollars, and there was something funny about the whole business, and my father and Mr. Root and Mr. Smale, and Tad’s father and Mr. Jones knew the joke and laughed about it a lot up on Birch Island where we were spending the summer, but they did not tell us or anybody. The notice in the paper only said, “$25 Reward for information leading to the recovery of five barrels stolen from the Root Wholesale Grocery,” or something like that. But I’ll tell you what the joke was. We found out later on.
One of the things Mr. Root sold in his wholesale grocery was cider—sweet cider—and he sold it by the barrel, but he had five barrels of sweet cider that turned hard while it was in his grocery cellar, and it was against the law to sell hard cider or to have it around, so he thought he had better get rid of it. He didn’t want to go to jail. Nobody does, I guess.
So one day Mr. Root went out onto the platform back of his grocery and he said to his truck-driver:
“Joe, I’ve got five barrels of cider in the cellar that has turned hard, and I want to get rid of it. I want you to haul those five barrels down to the river tomorrow and empty that hard cider into the river and bring the barrels back. I don’t want any hard cider around here.”
“All right, Mr. Root,” Joe said; “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Well, that was all right, but it happened that there were a lot of men in the alley near the platform just then, standing around and looking at a trained bear an Italian had, and one of them must have heard Mr. Root and wanted hard cider, for that night the grocery cellar was broken into and five barrels were stolen out of it. But the joke was that the thief did not get the five barrels of hard cider; he got five barrels of molasses. He made a mistake. He took the molasses and left the hard cider. So the next day Joe dumped out the cider and Mr. Root offered a reward for the molasses. But nobody came for the reward, and it looked as if all that molasses was gone forever. And the thing Mr. Root and father and all the men laughed about was how surprised the thieves would be when they broached a barrel to have a good drink of hard cider and found it was molasses. They thought the thieves would be pretty badly surprised and scared, because, instead of taking five barrels of cider that Mr. Root did not want, they would have taken five barrels of molasses he did want. They would be mighty worried thieves.
But nobody found the molasses or caught the thieves and everybody forgot all about it.
We worked inside the shack at first, digging deeper and deeper, and we got pretty good worms and quite a lot of them.
“But say!” Wampus said, all of a sudden. “Say! Anybody can come
