“A little sleep wouldn’t do me any harm,” says I.
“Go ahead and sleep,” says Catty.
“Maybe it can be done,” says I, “but I haven’t ever got used to sleeping
on the corner of a case of canned corn. The difficulty,” says I, “is
where to put my feet.”
“Um.... Let’s fix up a place to be comfortable,” says Catty. “It’s dark
enough, and with this mutiny plot going on, nobody’s going to keep close
watch. We’ll make us a cave,” says he.
“You go ahead,” says I, “and when it’s done call me.”
“I mean it,” says he. “We can shift these boxes, and kind of pile them
around, and make a space in the middle big enough to lie down in. It’ll
be safer, too. Kind of a hiding place.”
“All right,” says I. “Commence.”
It turned out to be easier than I thought. We just shifted cases and
rucked them away cautious and piled them in a tier around a spot about
five feet square, right slam in the middle of the pile. It took a half
an hour, because we had to work slow and be careful not to make any
noise. When it was done Catty says, “I’ll take the first watch and you
snooze. In two hours I’ll wake you and it’ll be your watch.”
So I cuddled up on the sand and shut my eyes. At first the sand felt
kind of soft and comfortable. Pretty soon it wasn’t so soft, and then it
started to get _hard_. In fifteen minutes it was harder than any rock I
ever heard of. It was a _mean_ hard—the kind of a hard that reaches out
and pokes you. Never again as long as I live will I try to sleep on
sand. I ached and creaked. But I was so tired and so sleepy that pretty
soon I fell off to sleep and dreamed dreams. I never was so busy
dreaming in my life, and none of them pleasant.
It seemed as if I’d hardly shut my eyes when Catty shook me and
whispered that it was my watch.
“You said I could sleep two hours,” says I.
“You have,” says he. “Two long ones.”
“I just this minute laid down,” says I, but I got up just the same, and
rubbed my eyes, and felt like a boiled owl. Catty curled up in the
corner, and that was the end of him.
I never thought two hours could be so long, but they can. Just sit in
the dark, all alone, scairt half stiff the way I was—do it for five
minutes and see. Why, five minutes is a week long, and two hours is the
best part of a year. I don’t see why it takes men a couple of months to
build a house. If all hours are as long as mine were then, a dub
carpenter could build a hotel in fifteen minutes.
It was lucky nothing happened. I could hear somebody walking around
every little while, and thought it was a guard, but that was all. I woke
Catty, and took another snooze myself, and then it was morning. Morning
means breakfast, and I’m partial to breakfast. When I get up I want
food, and if I don’t get food, why, I’m not so awful happy.
“Catty,” says I, “got a cup of coffee in your pocket?”
“Boys shouldn’t drink coffee,” says he. “It says so in the book.”
“All right. Give me a glass of milk and about twelve flapjacks and two
or three fried cakes, and I’ll call it square.”
“Well,” says he, “I don’t see why we should starve when we’re almost
buried in food.”
“Raw canned peas don’t strike me very hard for breakfast food,” says I.
“No, but there must be crackers or biscuit, or something like that, and
maybe canned meat. I’ve heard there’s nothing like the juice of canned
tomatoes for thirst.”
“Uhhh!” says I.
“You always read about cowboys drinking it,” he says, “in wild-west
stories.”
“Let’s see what we can find,” says I.
We didn’t find much that was useful. But we did make out a breakfast
after a fashion. The difficulty was opening cases without making a
racket, and the way we did it was to cut into them with our jackknives.
It was slow, but it worked. There were some crackers like hardtack, only
harder, and there was a case of cans of corned beef, and I found a big
box of sweet cookies. It saved us from starving clean to death, but it
didn’t help the thirst any.
“Let’s try the tomatoes,” says Catty.
“You take the first swig,” says I, “and if you live through it, I’ll
come next.”
“Nope,” says he, “we’ll open two cans. I’ll count three and we both
drink at once.”
So we got out a couple of cans and bored two holes in the tops, and
Catty says, “One—two—three.” Neither of us made a move.
“Bad start,” he says. “Try again.”
It’s lucky few things are as bad as you think they are going to be. This
wasn’t. Tomato juice wouldn’t be an awful punishment if it wasn’t for
the seeds. You kind of have to drink through your teeth so as to screen
the seeds out. When we got used to it we could do it pretty accurate,
and the juice was wet. It was mighty refreshing, too, when we finally
got it down, and right off I felt a lot better.
“Now what?” says I.
“Nothing but wait,” says he.
“We can’t get out of here by daylight.”
“Not a chance.”
“And it’ll be ten hours before dark again. I’m crazy about being cooped
up here for ten hours.”
“Maybe,” says he, “something will happen to pass the time away.”
“More’n likely,” I says, “what with mutiny and all that’s going on.”
“They won’t mutiny,” says he, “until the treasure’s found. It would be
foolish. But the minute anybody digs up any gold, why, off she pops.”
“It doesn’t seem right to stay here, knowing there’s going to be a
mutiny, and not give this Jonas P. Dunn warning of it. I never heard of
any heroes that stay around and allowed mutineers to do what they
wanted. Heroes always do something smart and wonderful, and rescue all
the good folks.”
[Illustration: THERE WAS EXCITEMENT FOR A MINUTE AND EVERYBODY CAME
RUNNING]
“There’s something in that,” he says kind of thoughtful. “I’ll think it
over.”
It wasn’t long before the digging commenced right alongside of us, and
you can bet we were pretty interested. Any shovelful might uncover the
treasure, and then things would pop. It was like waiting for somebody to
jab a pin into you. Exciting? Sure it was, but I can do with less
excitement and more peace and comfort.
Then I remembered the case of sardines we buried the night before. I
just remembered it in time. One of the diggers let out a yell, and
everybody gathered around and there was excitement. I never saw a mutiny
start, so I don’t know exactly how it’s done, but I was ready for
anything, and I was glad I could swim. My mind was all made up to take a
header into the water—if I could get that far—and just swim. I’d swim
any place so long as I got away from where I was. Treasure didn’t mean a
thing to me. Whatever interest I had in it could have been bought for a
rusty horseshoe nail.
There was excitement for a minute and shouting and everybody came
running. But then a man busted open the case with his pick, and it
wasn’t anything but sardines. We were peeking out from under the
tarpaulin, and you never saw anything sag like that gang of men did. The
mutiny was ripe to pick, I guess, but it just laid down and groaned. You
never saw any crowd so disgusted in your life. Even Mr. Dunn came
running over, but when he saw what had been dug up he was the maddest
man in the country, and he acted it.
“If I find out the joker who buried that thing,” he says, as vicious as
a yellow dog, “I’ll fix him so he won’t joke again for a day or two.”
The men just looked at him and scowled. He walked off and the digging
commenced again, but somehow there didn’t seem to be such a lot of
enthusiasm about it. We could see one man who kept circulating among the
others, and right off we guessed he was the fellow who had got up the
mutiny, and that he was patching it together so it would run again when
he needed it. He was a big man, and there was something about his face
that I didn’t like a bit. He looked like the kind of man who would be
careless with other folks’ health.
So things quieted down again and the digging went on and waiting went
on.
“I wonder,” says I, “what they think on board the _Albatross_. I’ll bet
Naboth and Rameses III are boiling over. They’ll think we’re drowned or
something.”
“Can’t be helped,” says Catty. “When there’s an adventure like this
going on, somebody’s got to worry. They always do. It might as well be
Naboth.”
“What,” says I, “if they come to this pile for grub—and what if they
notice how we’ve piled up boxes.”
“They won’t,” says Catty, but he said it more like he hoped so than as
if he thought so.
It wasn’t more than ten minutes later when a mate or somebody came along
with a gang of men, three or four, and stopped.
“This pile of chuck,” says he, “has got to be moved. They’ll be digging
here before the day’s over. You men get to shifting it over to the
northeast corner there. Clean it up, and then spread the tarpaulin over
it again.... On the job, now.”
Nice, wasn’t it? And there we were roosting right in the middle. I know
how it feels to be inside of a banana and have somebody strip the
peeling off. It isn’t a comfortable sensation. They would go ahead and
just move the walls from around us, and there we’d be left as big as
life and twice as natural. And then somebody might get curious to know
what we were doing there. Somebody was almost sure to get curious about
it.
“Catty,” says I, “the mutineers will guess we’ve been here all night,
and that boss mutineer will know we overheard his plotting—and then
what?”
“Then,” says Catty, “it will be up to us to do something pretty slick to
escape. The heroes always escape somehow.”
“I wish,” says I, “you’d be real quick and think up how _these_ heroes
are going to escape. I’ve a feeling in my bones that it’ll take a
slicker scheme than usual.”
“If we only had some hollow pipes about two feet long,” says Catty.
“Then what?”
“Why, we’d just dig ourselves in, and let the pipes run up through the
sand to the air, and we’d lie there as comfortable as bugs in a rug and
breathe.”
“I don’t s’pose,” says I, “anybody would stop to wonder what those pipes
were sticking up for. Oh, no.”
“Anyhow,” says he, “we haven’t got them. And besides they’re going to
start digging this way, and so they’d dig us out anyway. It wasn’t a
very good scheme.”
“I wasn’t crazy about it when you mentioned it,” says I.
“Well,” says he, “you think of something now.”
“Me?” says I. “All I can think of is having a balloon come along and
drop us a rope. But I haven’t seen a balloon around here anywheres.”
“There’s some way out of it,” he says. “There’s always a way out of
everything. It just takes brains to get out of any kind of a fix.”
“There’s canned peas and tomatoes and corned beef, but I haven’t run
onto a crate of brains in this pile,” says I.
“So far as I can see,” he says, “you never ran onto many brains
anywhere.”
“There,” says I, “goes the first box. About seven minutes and we’re
going to be answering questions there isn’t any healthy answer to.”
No gang of men ever moved boxes as fast as that crew did. And then one
of them stripped the tarpaulin off the top of the heap and let in the
sunlight on us. We crouched close to the wall of boxes and put off being
discovered as long as we could. The number of cases between us and
trouble was getting mighty small.
“No scheme yet?” says I.
“Nary scheme,” says he, “but it’ll come. It’s got to come.”
“Just get the first end of it and give me a hold of it,” says I. “The
way I feel I could pull a scheme right out of anybody tail first. That’s
how bad I need one.”
Then a man took a box off the top of the inner row, and another one took
another box and another took another box.
“You’ve got about six seconds now,” says I.
“One second will be enough—if I get it,” says he.
“I wonder how it’ll feel?” says I.
“What?”
“Why,” says I, “whatever it is that’s going to happen to us.”
He shrugged his shoulders, and then his eyes got bright all of a sudden
and he reached over and poked me.
“I’ve got it,” says he.
“It’s time,” says I, and then a man’s arm reached over and took a box
from right in front of us.