TREASURE TROVE
The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in the creek by the
explosion was rather muddy, but it was wet, and it was fun to think we
were swimming in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was like
discovering a new ocean or something.
Wampus put down the can of kerosene.
“Come on out,” he said. “If we are going to dig for that land pirate’s
treasure to-day, we had better be burning out the bumblebees and getting
at it. Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. He wanted
to know what we were going to do with the kerosene, and I had to tell
him, and he’s going to make us give him half of all we find.”
“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” I wanted to know, for I
didn’t think Bill Catlin or anybody else had a right to any of that
treasure when Jibby had been the only one to think of it being there,
and when we had planned so hard to get it.
“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said.
And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the creek bank and looked
down at us getting into our clothes.
“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we find enough to make us all
rich and happy all the rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll
get busy.”
Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and deliberate as if he had
all day to do it in, and right there I made a mistake. I ought to have
kept my mouth shut until Jibby had his clothes on and his spectacles on
and was ready to talk, because that is always the safe thing to do. But
I had to say my say.
“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
tortoise-shell 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 what I think I know don’t amount
to much.”
Then Bill Catlin asked him what he had found in the books, and Jibby
said that “treasure trove” meant any gold or silver or money found
hidden in the ground or in any private place, the ownership of which was
unknown. In England, Jibby said, the treasure that was found belonged to
the king and not to the finder, but, if the owner was known or was
discovered later, the treasure belonged to the owner, and not to the
king or the finder at all, and if the finder kept it or hid it he could
be jailed.
“You don’t mean it!” Bill Catlin exclaimed.
“Yes, sir; that’s what the books say,” Jibby said. “And in the United
States there isn’t any such thing as treasure trove at all. When
anything is found on the land, it belongs to the man that finds it,
unless he knows the true owner, and then it belongs to the true owner,
just as if it was a cow or a suit of clothes or a bushel of apples.”
“Then I don’t come in at all, hey?” Bill Catlin said.
“No, sir,” Jibby said, “but all we have found so far is an old 1804
dollar.”
“Oh, I don’t want that,” said Bill Catlin carelessly. He was very much
disappointed; I guess he had expected to get fifty thousand dollars,
maybe. “Well,” he said, “I’ll go along and help you burn out the bees,
anyway.”
We were all ready to start then, and Wampus picked up the can of
kerosene and waded across the creek, and Tad and Skippy Root and I
followed him. Jibby sort of waited for Bill Catlin while Bill slid down
the bank, and just then we heard voices of men. The men were coming up
the creek, and we knew them by their voices. They were the Jim and Jake
and the rest that had been up the creek before--the tough customers that
had come all the way from Arkansas to hunt for the Murrell treasure.
They were coming back.
I ran up the bank of the creek in a hurry, and so did Wampus and Tad and
Skippy. I thought sure there was going to be trouble if those men caught
us, and I looked through the trees toward the road, all ready to run for
it. What I saw made me look twice.
“Gee whiz!” I said. “Look there, will you!”
It was enough to make any one look. What Wampus had said to his folks
must have leaked out, or something, for it looked as if every man and
boy in Riverbank was coming up the road toward the dead pine to dig for
that land pirate’s treasure. It looked like ten thousand, but I guess it
was only about a thousand men and boys. There were old men that could
hardly walk, and boys that were so young they could hardly walk, and
middle-aged men, and even a few women and some girls, and they all had
spades or picks or shovels. There were plenty of boys--dozens of them.
And our old friend, the Tough Customer tramp, was right there in the
front of them all.
I was still looking when Jibby Jones and Bill Catlin climbed the bank to
where they could see that great army of treasure-hunters coming up the
road. Jibby was talking to Bill Catlin, telling him who the men were
that were coming up the creek, and the minute he saw the crowd on the
road he thought of something. None of the rest of us would have thought
of it, but Jibby did.
“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “just look at that crowd! They’re coming to dig
for treasure, and I shouldn’t wonder if all the rest of Riverbank came
next. It is like a rush to the gold fields, or to the oil fields.
Everybody that can come is coming. Why don’t you make some money out of
it?”
“Money? I’m always glad enough to make money,” said Bill Catlin, “but
how can I make money out of that crowd?”
“You can’t out of all of them,” Jibby said, “but you can out of some of
them. You could make, anyway, a dollar apiece out of a lot of them. It’s
the kind of treasure trove we can go half and half on. You have a right
to keep all the people off this part of your farm, and you have a right
to charge them a dollar apiece for letting them come on it and dig for
treasure. If you say so Wampus and George and Skippy and Tad will do the
collecting. We’ll collect a dollar apiece and give you half of it.”
Bill Catlin thought it over and said:
“All right; that’s a go.”
By that time the seven pirate money-hunters had come up the creek and
were climbing the bank to where we were. They looked mean, too. The one
called Jim, who was the old land pirate’s great-grandson, came right up
to us and said:
“Look here! Are you the folks that blew up our stuff? We don’t stand for
any business like that. You hadn’t any right to do it, and for half a
cent we’d light into you and break you into pieces and chew you up. Now,
we’ve got business here and we want you to get away from here and stay
away.”
“Yes, sir,” Jibby Jones said in his solemn way. “Maybe we will. We
didn’t know you owned this farm. We thought Wampus Smale’s father owned
it, and that Mr. Catlin here rented it. We thought that anybody that
came on the farm without Mr. Catlin’s permission was trespassing and
could be put in jail or something. Why, look at all the people!”
The man named Jim climbed up the bank and looked. He swore.
“What’s that crowd?”
“They’re going to hunt for some old land pirate’s treasure, I guess,”
Jibby said. “I guess they think there is some of it hidden around here
somewhere. But Mr. Catlin thought we would charge them a dollar apiece
for letting them hunt it. We didn’t know you owned this land.”
“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.”