“A dollar, hey?” said the land pirate’s great-grandson. “Well, we’ll give you a dollar apiece—seven dollars for the seven of us—if that’s what you want.”
“Thank you,” Jibby said very politely, and, while the land pirate’s great-grandson was counting out the money, he told Wampus and Skippy and Tad and Mr. Catlin and me to go and stop the crowd and tell them it cost a dollar a day to hunt land pirate’s treasure on this farm. “And tell them to look out for the bumblebees,” he said. “We wouldn’t like the whole of Riverbank to get all stung up when all they are doing is trying to get the treasure before we get it.”
So Bill Catlin and all us boys but Jibby ran toward the crowd to tell them, and one of the first men we saw was the sheriff. We boys did not know him very well, but Bill Catlin did, and he went up to him and warned him that coming on the farm was trespass and that he looked to the sheriff to warn everybody and to keep off himself.
The sheriff hated it, but he had to do it, because it was his duty. He turned and held up both hands, to stop the crowd.
“But you can tell them,” Bill Catlin said, just before the sheriff spoke up, “that they can come on the farm and hunt treasure for one dollar each per day.”
XXIV
The Treasure
So that was what the sheriff told them, and at first there was a good deal of complaining, but, when they saw that the sheriff and Bill Catlin meant it, they formed in line at the corner, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus and me collected the dollars. Every time we took a dollar we said, “Thank you. Look out for bumblebees under the old dead pine there,” and they did look out. Most of them went a good distance around the old pine, and every one of them made a straight line for the old tumbledown farmhouse as soon as they were safe from the bees. Some that did not have money to pay the dollar borrowed some from others, but a few could not get in. But I’ve got to tell you what Jibby was doing.
As soon as Jibby had the seven dollars from the Arkansas men he said:
“All right, you can hunt treasure now, until midnight, but if you don’t find it by then it will cost you another seven dollars.”
“Don’t you worry, son,” the man named Jim said. “We’ll find what there is to find before sundown, and if you hadn’t blown up our dynamite we would have found it in half an hour. We know where it is.”
“That’s good,” said Jibby Jones. “My father always says it is wise to know what you are going to do before you do it. So I guess you know the law about hidden treasure, too?”
“It belongs to the man that owned it in the first place,” said the man named Jim, “and I guess that as good as means me. I didn’t come all the way up here from Arkansas without getting ready beforehand, like your father says to. I’ve got papers here to prove that I’m the great-grandson of old John A. Murrell, the land pirate, and that I’m his only heir. So that settles that! If great-grandfather was alive, it would be his treasure, and if any other Murrells were alive part of the treasure would be theirs, but I’m the only one alive, so it is mine. That’s all fixed, and if there is any treasure there I get half, and these six friends of mine divide the other half among them. That so, men?”
The six tough-looking Arkansans said it was so.
“Go and get it, then,” Jibby Jones said.
Jim and Jake and the other five got together and talked awhile in whispers, looking out through the trees now and then. They were making plans. The crowd from Riverbank was so big it couldn’t all get inside the ruined farmhouse and those that couldn’t were digging outside of it, and the whole lot—those inside and those outside—were shouting and quarreling and carrying on the way money-crazy people do. It was like a riot or something, and all the while more strings of people were coming up the road and stopping to pay us a dollar, and then rushing for the old farmhouse, afraid they would not get there in time.
The seven Arkansans had their spades and shovels and picks, and they got together in a bunch, and when Jim gave the word they started across the weedy field with a rush, and straight for the old signal pine, too. Jibby watched them until they were halfway across the field, and then he came wandering toward where we boys and Bill Catlin were collecting money from the late comers. We had our pockets full of silver dollars and bills and small change.
“That’s pretty good,” Jibby said, “but we made one mistake.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Do you mean we should have brought a gunnysack to carry the money in?”
“No,” he said; “we ought to have advertised in the Riverbank ‘Eagle’—the weekly edition of it that goes to the farmers. Everybody in town knows about the hidden treasure by now, but the farmers don’t. We ought to have put an advertisement in the paper so the farmers could have paid us a dollar apiece, too. But I suppose no one can think of everything.”
We all turned just then, because one of the Arkansas men had let out a yell. A bumblebee had just stung him. The next moment another one let out a yell; he had got his sting, too.
The Arkansas men had gone at the old pine tree slam bang, because they knew they had to work fast. They knew that, as soon as the men and
