THE WORM MINE
The next morning we all went down to the shaft-house, which was the old
shack near Mosquito Hollow, and set to work in the worm mine. Jibby’s
idea was that we should mine some first-class worms and then set a
trot-line in the river and bait it with the worms, and twice a day we
would “run” the trot-line and get the fish. Then we would sell the fish
to our folks and to the other families on our island. And, every day
when we were not running the trot-line, we would be catching fish with
poles, and we would sell those fish, too. And before the summer was
over, we would, maybe, have enough money to have Wampus’s motor-boat
mended.
Well, I don’t know how that would have worked out, because we did not
raise the money that way. We got it by solving the mystery of the stolen
cider that we had heard the Rat talking to the Tough Customer about. But
the credit belongs to Jibby Jones--I guess you will see that.
It was Skippy Root’s father that offered the reward, because the barrels
were his barrels. They had been stolen from his wholesale grocery house
down in Riverbank.
The reward was twenty-five dollars, and there was something funny about
the whole business, and my father and Mr. Root and Mr. Smale, and Tad’s
father and Mr. Jones knew the joke and laughed about it a lot up on
Birch Island where we were spending the summer, but they did not tell us
or anybody. The notice in the paper only said, “$25 Reward for
information leading to the recovery of five barrels stolen from the Root
Wholesale Grocery,” or something like that. But I’ll tell you what the
joke was. We found out later on.
One of the things Mr. Root sold in his wholesale grocery was
cider--sweet cider--and he sold it by the barrel, but he had five
barrels of sweet cider that turned hard while it was in his grocery
cellar, and it was against the law to sell hard cider or to have it
around, so he thought he had better get rid of it. He didn’t want to go
to jail. Nobody does, I guess.
So one day Mr. Root went out onto the platform back of his grocery and
he said to his truck-driver:
“Joe, I’ve got five barrels of cider in the cellar that has turned hard,
and I want to get rid of it. I want you to haul those five barrels down
to the river to-morrow and empty that hard cider into the river and
bring the barrels back. I don’t want any hard cider around here.”
“All right, Mr. Root,” Joe said; “I’ll do it to-morrow.”
Well, that was all right, but it happened that there were a lot of men
in the alley near the platform just then, standing around and looking at
a trained bear an Italian had, and one of them must have heard Mr. Root
and wanted hard cider, for that night the grocery cellar was broken into
and five barrels were stolen out of it. But the joke was that the thief
did not get the five barrels of hard cider; he got five barrels of
molasses. He made a mistake. He took the molasses and left the hard
cider. So the next day Joe dumped out the cider and Mr. Root offered a
reward for the molasses. But nobody came for the reward, and it looked
as if all that molasses was gone forever. And the thing Mr. Root and
father and all the men laughed about was how surprised the thieves would
be when they broached a barrel to have a good drink of hard cider and
found it was molasses. They thought the thieves would be pretty badly
surprised and scared, because, instead of taking five barrels of cider
that Mr. Root did not want, they would have taken five barrels of
molasses he did want. They would be mighty worried thieves.
But nobody found the molasses or caught the thieves and everybody forgot
all about it.
We worked inside the shack at first, digging deeper and deeper, and we
got pretty good worms and quite a lot of them.
“But say!” Wampus said, all of a sudden. “Say! Anybody can come into our
mine and mine worms; we don’t really own it. We don’t know who does own
this ground down here at this end of the island.”
Jibby stroked his nose awhile and thought.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to find out about that. Mostly,
miners can mine wherever they want to. The man that owns the land owns
the surface, but, when a prospector locates a mine and sinks his shaft,
he can mine anywhere he wants to, underground. I don’t know whether a
worm miner has that right or not. I know it is true of mineral mines,
but a worm isn’t quite a mineral; it is an animal. Anyway, I think we
had better stake out a claim here, because that is what miners always
do.”
So we staked out a claim, stakes at the four corners, so that it took in
the whole of Mosquito Hollow. It turned out to be all right, anyway,
because Skippy’s father owned the shack and the hollow, but we felt
better when we had our claim staked out. It was more regular and like
real miners.
We got the shaft about as deep as we thought it needed to be, and the
next morning we began to tunnel. We aimed the tunnel so it would go
under the back of the shack toward Mosquito Hollow, because that was the
best worm-bearing ore on the island, and, as soon as we began to tunnel,
Jibby got a saw and a hatchet and some nails and sent some of us to get
driftwood planks and boards, to use as mine timber to shore up the
tunnel with.
Almost as soon as we began to run the tunnel out toward Mosquito Hollow,
we struck better worm ore, and it got better all the time. Out of two
spadefuls of ore we could refine enough worms to last a boy for a whole
day’s fishing, even if the white perch were stealing his bait as fast as
he could put it on the hook. In half an hour after we had begun to
tunnel, we had enough worms to last the six of us a week.
“That’s enough,” Jibby said. “We’ll quit now and put up a sign on the
shack--‘Five Friends’ Worm Mine. Keep Out!’--and not mine any more until
we need more worms.”
I didn’t like that idea; none of us did. Mining worms was more fun than
fishing or anything else, and we all hated to stop, but it was Wampus
who thought of the big idea.
“Look here,” he said, leaning on his spade, “what’s the use of quitting?
We’ve got a worm mine here that is the best and only in the world, and
we’ve got the richest worm ore anybody could ever find. It is the driest
season for twenty years, and worms are harder to get than they ever
were. That’s so, isn’t it?”
It was, and we all said so.
“All right, then,” Wampus said, “now is the time to mine worms. Now is
the time everybody will be glad to buy worms. Now is the time when we
have the only worm mine in existence, but in a week or so somebody will
hear of the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and start another worm mine
somewhere, and then there will be more and more worm mines started and
everybody will be selling worms.”
“Selling them?” said Skippy.
“Sure!” Wampus said. “I said ‘selling them’ and I mean ‘selling them.’
Why, right here on Birch Island, we can sell a can of worms a day to
every family on the island. How many? Twenty families? And some will
need two cans. Say twenty-four cans a day. And, leaving out Sundays,
there are about sixty-five days that the families are up here--that
makes one hundred and thirty dozen cans of worms for the season. If we
only got ten cents a can, that would be one hundred and fifty-six
dollars.”
“Ten cents a can for worms like these!” exclaimed Tad, holding up a big
one. “They are worth a cent apiece! If we put one hundred in a can we
ought to get a dollar a can.”
“That would be one thousand and fifty-six dollars, then,” Wampus said.
“And only for what we sell on this island. Oh, boy! And think of how
many people go fishing from town who don’t spend the summer on this
island--hundreds!”
“From town?” Skippy cried. “What do you say ‘from town’ for? From all up
and down the old Mississippi! From all over the United States,
everywhere! Yes, and in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South
America people go fishing, don’t they? If we are going to sell
worms....”
“Canned ones,” I said, “packed in cans with holes in the lids, like
pepper-boxes, so the worms can breathe.”
We were all getting excited--all except Jibby Jones. All Jibby said was:
“Aluminum cans, because, if there are holes in the lids and the earth in
the cans is moist, cans made of tin would rust.”
“And, anyway,” said Wampus, jumping at that idea quick, “aluminum cans
would be better than tin; they would be lighter to ship and lighter for
fishermen to carry. When we get to shipping tons and tons of worms, the
difference in the weight of the cans will save us hundreds of dollars in
freight. And I say we ought to have a special can with a wire handle,
like a lard pail, only smaller, so boys could carry cans of our worms
easily when they go fishing.”
“Sure! Of course, we’ll do that,” I said, “and we ought to have a patent
lid--one that will come off and fit on again, like the lid of a
baking-powder can.”
“And with letters stamped on it,” said Skippy. “It ought to be stamped
‘Five Friends’ Mine--Best Quality Fishing Worms--Riverbank, Iowa.’”
“Yes,” said Wampus, “when they were our best quality, but you don’t
think we are going to throw away all the medium and small worms we get
out of the mine, do you? No, sir! We’ll have three grades--Best Quality,
Prime Quality, and Family Quality. They will be one dollar a can,
seventy-five cents a can, and fifty cents a can.”
“Except the half-size and the trial cans,” said Tad.
“Yes, and except the pails of bulk worms, assorted,” said Skippy. “We’ve
got to have some put up that way, and maybe some in kegs and some in
barrels, for general stores in the places where they don’t catch
anything but goggle-eyes and mudcats. These would be the cheapest we
would sell. They would be for stores where boys would come in with their
own old rusty tomato cans and say, ‘Say, mister, gimme two cents’ worth
of fishing worms.’”
Well, we went on planning about the worm mine that way for two or three
days and we kept right on digging the tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow
and timbering it up. Here and there we ran into sand, which has no worms
in it, and then we shifted the direction of the tunnel a little. Jibby
said the proper way was to follow the worm-veins wherever they went.