And neither did we. As nearly as we could figure it out, the Tough Customer and the Rat had dug one of their holes right spang on the spot where the X mark on the map showed that the treasure should be, if there was any. If they hadn’t found anything with all that digging, there wasn’t much chance that we would.
By this time we had got into the second week of August, and there was not any too much of vacation left. We walked up and down the creek, studying the lay of the land, but there was no question that the Tough Customer had found the right spot, according to the map. There was only one turn in the creek toward the west, and that was where they had dug. We thought, perhaps, the creek might have shifted, but when we walked here and there we saw that it hadn’t. It looked hopeless, and we were just ready to leave, when we saw a man come loping toward us, half doubled up and not wasting a bit of time, and after him were the Tough Customer, hobbling faster than you would believe a one-legged man could hobble, and the Rat. The Rat was making good time, too, but he didn’t seem anxious to go ahead of the Tough Customer.
As the man they were after came nearer and saw us, he came toward us, and when he had covered a few more yards we saw he was the old man everybody calls “Uncle Beeswax.” He had an axe and two baskets, and by the time he reached us he was just about all in. He was so out of breath that he couldn’t talk, and it was plain enough he was almost too scared to talk, anyway.
The far side of the creek was five or six feet higher than the side we were on. When Uncle Beeswax came up to us and we saw he was being chased, we grabbed his axe and baskets and took him by the arms and hustled him across the creek and up the bank. Maybe we might have hustled on up the hill with him, but he was plumb played out. He dropped down on the short grass and just panted.
“No use!” he panted. “Played out! Got to rest—got to rest!”
So we let him rest, and we turned and took a look at the Tough Customer and his pardner. They had stopped about fifty feet away, and were looking at us and talking to each other. Whatever they had been chasing old Uncle Beeswax for, I guess they didn’t like the idea of tackling five husky boys and a man, even if he was an old man. So, after a minute or two, they sat down and watched us. The Tough Customer was pretty well played out himself, stumping so far on a wooden leg.
Now, we all knew Uncle Beeswax, except maybe Jibby Jones, and we knew there wasn’t a mean drop of blood in him, or any harm. He was one of the most aged men any of us knew, and he lived a mile or so farther up the river in a shanty-boat of his own, and he was all right. He was a little old man, hardly as tall as Wampus, and he had a long white beard that almost touched the ground. The thing you thought of when you saw him was a gnome, the kind you see in pictures with a long pointed cap and a pick to dig gold with. He made his living mostly by finding bee trees, and selling the honey and beeswax to folks in Riverbank, but he fished some, and along in the fall he hunted for wild grapes and sold them for about a dollar a bushel, or maybe a dollar and a half.
We island boys had seen old Uncle Beeswax hundreds of times, but he had always acted solemn and severe and fussy and nervous, as if he was afraid we would meddle with his skiff or something. Probably boys teased him a lot because he was so funny-looking; anyway, he did not like boys. And one of the things they teased him about was his nose. He hated to be teased about his nose, because he never drank a drop, but his nose was as long as Jibby Jones’s nose, but thick and bulby and as red as fire.
So there we were like two armies, we on the high ground and the Tough Customer and the Rat on the low ground, and each waiting to see what the other would do. And presently Uncle Beeswax got his breath.
“Can’t understand it! Can’t understand it!” he said, shaking his head so that his long beard wiggled back and forth. “Never was chased in my life before. And they acted like they would kill me, them men.”
“What for?” I asked him.
“Nothin’!” he said. “Nothin’ at all! I was in yonder”—and he pointed toward the swamp below the slough—“a-lookin’ for grape trees, and I come out again. The skeeters was too much for me—they was eatin’ me alive. And I was tuckered; I’m old; I’m mighty old.”
“Well, they didn’t chase you because you were old, did they?” I asked him, because he stopped talking.
“I don’t know why they chased me,” he said, as if his feelings were hurt that anybody should. “I wasn’t doin’ harm. I just sat down on the edge of their pesky little shanty-boat to rest my legs, and they come at me, yellin’ and shoutin’, and chased me.”
He made a move to wipe the sweat off his face, and when he opened his hand there was a piece of
