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.”
XIV
Uncle Beeswax
Three times after that we went up to Greenland Slough, and two of the times we went up the creek, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were not at the mouth of the creek to guard it. One of the times we found them up the creek where they were doing their treasure digging, but the third time they were nowhere around, and we had a chance to see what they had been doing.
For plain ordinary everyday tramps they had done a lot of work, I will say. Nobody could have hired them, for day’s wages, to do as much digging as they had done. They had dug in eleven places—five on one bank of the creek and six on the other—and the holes were deep enough to bury oxen in, one on top of the other and both standing. They had
