That was always the way it was with Harry Donnelle; he’d laugh and make
a joke about everything and jolly Pee-wee, but anyway, one thing was
sure, and that was that we knew more about what happened away back on
that day before any of us was born, than the man that wrote that last
newspaper article. We knew that that fellow Trent didn’t kill his pal,
and we knew that he wasn’t shot by his pal, either. We knew that some
man who signed his name Thor did that, and we knew that there was a
couple of bags of gold, too.
I said to Harry, “I wish you’d please be serious and tell us what you
think.”
“I think we’ll take an auto trip up toward Lake Ontario and the St.
Lawrence,” he said.
“Can Skinny go?” I asked him.
“Surest thing you know,” he said; “Skinny’ll go as first mate. You’ll go
as ship’s cook, Grove will be a common seaman, and Pee-wee’ll be a very
common seaman. If the wind is fair and we don’t have any squalls or
blow-outs, I don’t see why we shouldn’t make the desert island of
Steuben Junction by Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Oh boy!” I said, “that’ll be _great_.”
Then he got kind of more serious and he said, “Now you kids listen to
me. There may be a sequel to that affair, and then again there may not
be. We’re going on an automobile trip, the five of us. On the way back,
I’ll drop you off at Temple Camp, if you say, so you can join the rest
of the bunch.
“We’ll take the Adirondack tour up as far as Watertown and see if we can
dig up Steuben Junction, and then we’ll bang around in the woods.
There’s just about chance enough of our finding something, to make the
trip interesting. But we’re out for a good time, not for gold, just
remember that. Then none of us will be disappointed. Understand,
Pee-wee?”
Grove said, “Yes, but there were two bags of gold and when that fellow
was discovered, he didn’t have them. They must be somewhere.”
“Unless he gave them to some poor family or to a hospital or an Old
Ladies’ Home,” Harry said, awful funny like, “and I don’t just think he
did. I don’t believe he was that kind of a train robber. I think the
dirt on his knife meant something. It proved _what_, but it didn’t prove
_where. I_ think that when he found he couldn’t do much more than crawl
and was getting weaker and weaker, he may have dug a hole and buried his
gold, so he wouldn’t be caught with the goods. If he did, he buried some
seeds, too. And that was twenty-five years ago. There may possibly be
some sign now where there wasn’t any then. Get me? If we should happen
to see a big tall pine in a neighborhood where there aren’t _any_ other
pines, why——”
“Oh boy, we’ll buy a big cabin cruiser,” Pee-wee yelled, “and we’ll
donate about ten thousand dollars to Temple Camp and——”
“We’ll pay off the National Debt and start a line of airplane jitneys to
the moon,” Harry said. “Only first we’ve got to find the tree. And we’re
not going to hunt for it in somebody’s backyard, either. All we know is,
there are some woods up around a place called Steuben Junction; there
may be miles of woods.”
“What’s a mile—that’s nothing,” Pee-wee said. “I’ll get a couple of
spades from our gardener.”
Harry said, “All right, I’ve been promising some of you an auto trip,
and the sooner it’s over the better. So now you’d better trot along and
square matters with your scoutmaster and your folks. I don’t want to be
charged with kidnapping. I hope they won’t let you go, but if they do,
I’ll see it through.”
“Don’t you worry,” Pee-wee said, “I have my mother and father trained.”
I guess we were all glad of one thing, anyway, and that was that
vacation began the very next day. Some fellows don’t bother much about
school, but I never cut anything—not even vacation.