“Except the half-size and the trial cans,” said Tad.
“Yes, and except the pails of bulk worms, assorted,” said Skippy. “We’ve got to have some put up that way, and maybe some in kegs and some in barrels, for general stores in the places where they don’t catch anything but goggle-eyes and mudcats. These would be the cheapest we would sell. They would be for stores where boys would come in with their own old rusty tomato cans and say, ‘Say, mister, gimme two cents’ worth of fishing worms.’ ”
Well, we went on planning about the worm mine that way for two or three days and we kept right on digging the tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow and timbering it up. Here and there we ran into sand, which has no worms in it, and then we shifted the direction of the tunnel a little. Jibby said the proper way was to follow the worm-veins wherever they went.
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
