“Hurry, boys!” Jibby said. “There’s going to be a grand time here. I shouldn’t wonder if Orlando bit this man, too, besides other happenings.”
Jibby opened the neck of the bag.
“Wooden legs, Orlando!” he said, when the cat put its head out.
“Look here!” the Tough Customer whined from down in the well. “Don’t do it! Don’t let that animal loose on me. I’ll give you—I’ll give you anything you say.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jibby said. “I sort of hate to miss the fun. But, I don’t know. I might be willing to dicker. How about a dollar? How about an 1804 dollar?”
“I haven’t got—” the man began.
“Scoot, boys!” Jibby shouted. “Here she goes! Sic him, Orlando!”
“I’ll give it! I’ll give it!” the Tough Customer yelled, and—plunk!—on the hard dirt at Jibby’s feet the 1804 dollar fell. Jibby picked it up and looked at it. It was our dollar, right enough.
Jibby pushed the cat’s head back into the green bag and tied the strings and put the bag in the basket. Then he made Wampus with his spade and Tad with his axe stand ready to take care of the Tough Customer if he tried any funny tricks, and Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into the well and pulled the Tough Customer out. He did not wait to talk; he gave one look at the basket and scooted out of that cellar.
We piled out after him, because we did not want him throwing any bricks or rocks down on us, but we saw him hobbling down the road as fast as his wooden leg would carry him, and we whooped and laughed and patted Jibby Jones on the back.
“That’s nothing!” he said. “I saw a man palm a dollar once in a sleight-of-hand show, so I had some experience that way. And I just imagined Orlando was a skunk for this afternoon only. I sort of imagined that Tough Customer was not going to let an 1804 dollar drop down a sewer. It looked too smart, to have him standing right over that grating. So that’s all there is to it—experience and imagination.”
And that’s so. They do make a mighty good team. When you have Experience and Imagination hitched up together, you can do almost anything. I was thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a yowl.
Jibby Jones grinned.
“Orlando wants to go home,” he said. And he took the bag out of the basket and took the cat out of the bag. He dropped Orlando on the ground, and the cat started for home at a good trot. The cat took to the road, and presently the Tough Customer looked back, and he saw Orlando trotting along toward him. He gave one yell and dived over a fence, and the last we saw of him that day was while he was scooting across a ploughed field as hard as he could scoot.
XXI
Winged Enemies
It must have been about half-past ten or eleven o’clock in the morning by the time we got rid of the Tough Customer that had come to the old Murrell farm to get the land pirate’s buried treasure before we could get it. We stood there by the old brick house laughing and shouting while Jibby Jones’s cat Orlando chased the Tough Customer off the road.
When we saw the Tough Customer vanish over a rise of ground, the rest of our work of getting the buried treasure—if there was any—seemed as simple as opening a pie to pull out a plum. We had the rest of the morning and all afternoon and part of the evening to work in, and Jibby Jones had figured out that the buried treasure must be under the old signal pine tree in the corner, near where the two roads crossed.
“Come on!” I said. “Now we can get it; there’s not a thing that can stop us.”
And that was how it looked to me. There we were, Jibby Jones and Wampus Smale and Tad Willing and Skippy Root and myself, and we had enough lunch to last all day, and we had a spade and a pick and an axe and a long rope. It did look as if getting that treasure would be the easiest thing in the world. I felt as if my hands were already scooping up gold money and silver money and letting it drip through my fingers.
I can’t hardly tell you how simple it seemed to get that buried treasure, and how easy. Just try yourself to see how easy it looked to me. Just behind us was the rotted old brick farmhouse where Jibby said the treasure was not hidden. Over yonder was the dead pine tree in the corner of the lot—the tree Jibby Jones said was the signal pine, under which the pirate’s treasure was probably buried—and between was nothing but a few rods of ground with weeds and tall grass on it. And we had the digging tools. All we had to do was walk across to the dead pine tree and dig. So I said so.
“Come on!” I said. “Let’s hurry and get that treasure before anybody else comes along to bother us.”
But Jibby Jones did not pick up the lunch-basket or make any move toward the dead pine tree. He stood and smoothed his nose with his forefinger.
“No,” he said, “let’s take a swim first. Let’s go to the creek and find a swimming-pool and take a swim.”
“We can’t,” I said. “There never was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run, and there isn’t one now.”
“I don’t know,” Jibby said. “Up in the Catskill Mountains there are streams, and sometimes there is no pool in a place, and the next year there is one. You can’t always tell,
