As soon as we had started, Brent said, “Well, it doesn’t look half bad,
does it?”
“Do you know who those fellows were? Do you know who those fellows
were?” our young hero fairly screamed.
“I think they came from Mars,” Brent said; “that’s the way it looks to
me.”
I said, “You can joke but it’s pretty serious.”
“They were _smugglers_ that’s what they were,” Pee-wee shouted.
“They were either smugglers or book-agents,” Brent said. “In either case
they deserved to be murdered. Maybe they were introducing a new kind of
soap——”
“You make me sick,” Pee-wee yelled; “there’s treasure somewhere and
we’re going to find it! It’s at HW limit, it said so, HW means something
about _hollow well_, I bet you.”
Brent said, “Maybe it means hot waffles; there’s a whole table d’hote
dinner in that paper. Maybe it means Hamburger wheat cakes. Anyway, the
Ohio River is a long way from Barrow’s Homestead.”
Then Brent got kind of serious, not _very_ serious, but kind of
serious—as serious as he could. And he said we should promise him that
we wouldn’t think any more about that dark, mysterious paper, or talk
about it to the other fellows until we got all through at Grumpy’s
Crossroads and reached Indianapolis so he could get hold of a map.
Because if we couldn’t find any stream named Snake Creek running into
the Ohio River, he didn’t want the fellows to be disappointed. He said
there was no use of our going on a wild goose chase.
You can bet we kept our promise to Brent, but I guess Pee-wee didn’t
have any more sleep till we reached Indianapolis. But anyway, he had a
pretty good appetite. He buried some treasure every night—ice cream
sodas at the reunion.
That’s one thing I like about slavery. Because if there hadn’t been any
slavery there wouldn’t have been any Civil War, and if there hadn’t been
any Civil War there wouldn’t have been any Veterans’ Reunion, and if
there hadn’t been any Veterans’ Reunion, there wouldn’t have been any
ice cream sodas there. See?
Gee whiz, I never was in the Civil War, or the uncivilized war or any
other kind, but I got a black eye once. Anyway, I killed four sodas when
I got to that reunion.
I did it for my country’s sake.