“We don’t need any help,” I said. “We don’t want to divide this with anybody. Jibby Jones thought of the treasure being here, and it is going to be ours—all of it.”
“That so?” Bill Catlin asked. “How about treasure trove, my son?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“All I mean,” said Bill Catlin, grinning, “is that it seems to me I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a law of treasure trove, and that half of any hidden treasure that is found on any man’s land belongs to the man that owns the land.”
“All right!” I said, quick. “That settles it. Wampus’s father owns this land and you don’t.”
“I lease it,” said Bill Catlin. “I rent it of Wampus’s father. As I look at it, that gives me everything that is on the land or in the land. Why, I could order Wampus’s father off this land if I wanted to, or the whole lot of you, for that matter. I could sue you for trespass this very minute, if I wanted to, for coming on this land. Sure, I could! I guess that makes me even better than the owner. I guess it entitles me to half the treasure we find.”
What Bill Catlin said took all the wind out of my sails in a second. There was one sail it did not take the wind out of, though; that was the jib on Jibby Jones’s face—the nose he called his jib sail. Jibby was hitching up his trousers as if Bill Catlin or nothing in the world mattered a cent.
“Is that so, Jibby?” Tad Willing asked.
“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in his slow way, “and he can sue us for trespass if we don’t go. I know that, because once, when father was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in Arizona, the man that owned the farm ordered father off and father did not want to go. So the man hit father on the head with a club, and father sued him for damages, and the justice of the peace made the man pay father five dollars for hitting him, and made father pay the man five dollars for trespassing, and neither of them had five dollars.”
“What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Catlin.
“No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace lent father five dollars and father paid the man with it, and then the man paid father with it, and then father paid it back to the justice of the peace. Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope that will be a lesson to both of you. You have got off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I would have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, and I haven’t got but eight dollars and sixty cents, so where would you have been then?’ ”
Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby Jones right away, because laughing and liking are always close together.
“I bet they would have gone to jail, just because they lacked a little common sense,” Bill Catlin said. “If I had been there, I could have fixed it up easy. I would have had your father borrow the eight dollars and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your father would have owed him only one dollar and forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay the money back to your father and the man would have owed your father only one dollar and forty cents. Then your father would have given the eight dollars and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t have owed him anything. And then all your father would have had to do would have been to borrow one dollar and forty cents from the justice, and when it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would have been paid. Nobody would have owed anybody anything. Your father and the man could have paid each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to use common sense.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely.
It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-looking boy with tortoiseshell spectacles take what he said so seriously, and he was mighty tickled.
“You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I can see that,” he said to Jibby, which wasn’t saying anything very nice to us, as I looked at it, but we didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going to talk again.
“Yes, sir,” Jibby said, as if he was pleased to have Bill Catlin compliment him that way. “I do try to know something; I find it comes in handy sometimes. I think it is better than just thinking you know something. My father says so. My father says it is foolish to read in a story book that a man made a trip to the moon and then to think you know that a man did make a trip to the moon; my father says it is better to find out the true facts first.”
“And your father knows what he is talking about,” Bill Catlin said.
“Yes, sir,” said Jibby Jones meekly; and then he added, in the same meek way, “What book did you read about treasure trove in, Mr. Catlin?”
Well, Bill Catlin sort of looked at Jibby as if he hadn’t seen him before. He stared at him. Then he got red in the face.
“What did you ask that for?” he wanted to know.
“Because in the books I read,” Jibby said, “I couldn’t find anything about halves and halves when you find treasure. Of course,” he added, “I only read some encyclopædias and law books and things like that, as anybody would when they start out to dig for treasure. I don’t believe even the biggest book weighed over ten pounds, and only a part of that one was about hidden treasure, so maybe
