“It was lucky we stopped in Bennett’s,” Pee-wee said; “do you think
anybody heard us talking about the treasure? Did you notice that fellow
at the soda fountain—how he was kind of listening?”
“I think he’s a pirate disguised as a soda clerk,” I told him. “Maybe
he’ll foil us yet.”
“We’d better come in two or three times each day and get sodas,” the kid
said, “then we can watch him.”
“Good idea,” I told him.
“Oh boy, won’t it be great!” he kept on. “When do you think we’ll start?
We’ll go down to the library to-morrow and find out about that poplar,
hey? And I’ll get a couple of big new bags to bring home the gold.”
Jiminy crinkums, that kid was already on his way home with the treasure.
I expected to see him the next day with a red sash on and a red cloth
tied over his head and a dagger between his teeth.
I said, “Kid, don’t get too excited; I’ve got Harry Donnelle’s number
all right. He’s not counting on finding any treasure. He just wants some
place to go, that’s all. Maybe there’s one chance in a hundred of
finding any gold. Don’t lose any sleep over it.”
“The automobile ought to have a name,” he said.
I said, “All right, we’ll call it the good ship _Cadillac_; that’s the
kind of a machine it is.”
“There ought to be a mutiny,” he said.
“The only thing to mutiny will be the carburetor, or maybe the magneto,”
I told him, “and then we’ll have to put in at some desert island and
hunt for a garage.”
“Will the whole troop go?” he asked me.
“Not while Harry Donnelle is conscious,” I said. “I don’t think he’ll
take more than three or four of us.”
“That leaves plenty of room for the treasure,” Pee-wee said. “Who will
it be? You and I——”
“I’m going to ask him please to take Skinny, I know that,” I said.
“I bet Grove Bronson will want to go after what his sister tells him,”
he went on. “He ought to go as her representative, hey? She’s entitled
to her share of the treasure—you can’t deny that. Anyway, one of us
ought to watch Bennett’s.”
Now this is the way I thought about it, because I know Harry Donnelle. I
remembered what he said about how a fellow might just as well take an
auto trip in one direction as another, and I didn’t believe he was
bothering his head much about finding buried treasure. That’s just the
kind of a fellow he is—happy-go-lucky. I guess that’s why everybody
likes him. But, cracky, I’m always game for an auto trip and I was crazy
to have Skinny (that’s little Alf) go on one, because he had never been
in an auto or had any fun like that.
I guess I might as well tell you about Skinny, because the way things
came out, it will be best if you know all about him. And especially
because he was one of the _big four_—that’s what Harry called us. Gee
whiz, maybe we weren’t very big, but we made noise enough. I guess as
long as I’m at it, I’ll tell you about the whole four of us, hey?
Anyway, you know all about Pee-wee, and I guess you know all about me.
I’m patrol leader of the Silver Foxes and it’s some job. That’s what
makes me so quiet and sad like—I have so much trouble. It’s such a
nervous strain, I have to rub it with liniment. I should worry.
Harry Donnelle said that the reason he took Grove Bronson was, because
Grove has the pathfinder’s badge and would be a good one when it came to
hunting for something. But that wasn’t the reason he took him at all.
The reason he took him was, because he’s Grace Bronson’s brother. Maybe
he thinks he can fool me, but he can’t. Anyway, Grove is one of the
raving Ravens (that’s Pirate Harris’s patrol), and he’s a nice fellow,
only he’s left-handed, but he can eat four helpings of chocolate
pudding. Gee whiz, that isn’t so bad for a fellow that’s left-handed. I
knew a left-handed fellow up at Temple Camp who could sing dandy.
So that leaves only Skinny, because if I were to tell you all about
Harry Donnelle’s adventures, believe _me_, there wouldn’t be any room
for anything else, and my sister says I’d better stop using her note
paper. Maybe you notice this story is pink—that’s because it’s written
on pink paper.
Skinny’s right name is Alfred McCord, and he lives in a marsh shanty;
there are a lot of those down near the river. He hasn’t got any father
and he lives all alone with his mother. They’re awful poor, but Skinny
should worry, because how he’s in our troop.
He’s a funny kid, Skinny is. All the fellows like him, but he’s kind of
queer. His hair is sort of streaky like, and he’s awful white in his
face. There’s one funny thing about him and that is that he can pass
most any merit badge test, but he can’t seem to get out of the
tenderfoot class. When he gets to be a first class scout, he’ll have
about a dozen merit badges waiting for him. He’s kind of different from
the rest of us and we call him our mascot, but anyway, all the fellows
like him a lot.
So now you know about all four of us and about Harry Donnelle. You
should worry about the rest of the troop.
The next day we went to the library and got a big book about trees. We
couldn’t find Dahadinee in the index, but anyway, we found something
about another tree. This is what the book said about it, and I read it
in a whisper to the other fellows:
“The Mackenzie or Balsam poplar sometimes attains in the forest
a height of one hundred and fifty feet and a trunk diameter of
five or six feet. When isolated from other trees it develops a
rather narrow irregular pyramidal open top and its parti-colored
leaves, as their dark green upper surfaces and light under
surfaces show successively as moved by the wind, make it a
handsome object.
“It is distinctly a northern tree, thriving along the banks
which are tributary to the Mackenzie River, in a climate too
severe for the existence of most other trees. In those cold
regions it is far the largest and most graceful of all trees.”
“I know where the Mackenzie River is!” Pee-wee shouted. “It rises in the
northwestern part of Canada, takes a northerly course and flows into
Beaufort Sea.”
“Correct, be seated,” I told him.
“That’s up near Alaska,” he said.
“Right as usual,” Grove said; “let’s hunt it up.”
“You don’t need to hunt it up,” Pee-wee said; “it’s there. I had it in
exams, in the third grade.”
“Maybe it was there then,” Grove said; “but how do we know it’s there
now? Safety first.”
“How can a river move?” he whispered, because one of the librarians had
her eye on him.
“That’s all a river ever does,” I told him; “did you ever know a river
to stand still?”
So we hunted it up in the Atlas and sure enough, there it was, away up
near Alaska and, good night, there was a river named the Dahadinee
flowing into it.
“We’ve got the treasure; We’ve got the treasure!” Pee-wee began
shouting.
“Shh!” I told him. “Don’t you know you’re in the library? Shhh.”