The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove Part 30

"Well," declared Morton, "that was considerable work, but it will be worth it. We'll hustle back to town now and tell the other fellows that everything's all right. Then we'll have nothing to do but wait for the fun. I'm as sure as I am that I'm alive that that sneak will try to circ.u.mvent me. I could see it in his eye."

Andy spent a restless night, his mind busied with plans to get the best of Morton. He rose early the next morning and roamed restlessly about town. The great problem confronting him was how to get the pick and shovel without Morton's getting wind of it. He finally concluded that it would be taking too much of a risk to buy the implements in the village, so he made a trip to a town five miles distant and got the necessary tools.

Night came at last, and the sneak sallied forth and set out for the old cabin, the location of which Morton had been careful to give to him.

Throwing down his tools, Andy carefully reconnoitred the surroundings.

The jokers had done their work so carefully that he saw nothing amiss, and after satisfying himself that the coast was clear, he started digging in the sand in front of the door.

It did not take him long to gain an entrance, and after getting in he lit two of his candles and took a careful survey of the surroundings.

There was nothing in sight to give him a clue. The sole furniture consisted of an old table and a couple of rickety chairs.

Somewhat at a loss where to begin, Andy finally started sounding the rough planking of the floor. When he came to the place where the planks had been ripped up the preceding evening, he saw that they were loose and resolved to take a chance there. He removed the boards, took off his coat and began to dig in earnest.

He made rapid progress at first, but soon his muscles, flabby and unused to such strenuous exercise, began to protest and he was forced to take a breathing spell.

Had he chanced to glance at the little window, his labors might have come to a premature conclusion. Grouped outside were Morton and his friends, almost bursting with smothered laughter. The sight of Andy, whose antipathy to work was well known, sweating away over the hardest kind of labor, amused them immensely.

Wholly unconscious of the amus.e.m.e.nt he was providing, Andy resumed his task and worked with such good will that it was not long before his spade struck on the edge of the buried trunk. He uttered a shout of delight and scattered the remaining sand in every direction. Before long he had uncovered the top of the trunk. This he tried to lift out of the hole. Finding it too heavy for this, however, and not able to restrain his impatience to see what it contained, he seized the pickax and smashed in the top.

His chagrin may be imagined when instead of the treasure he expected he found that the trunk was filled with sand. On top of this was a sheet of paper which Morton had placed there the previous evening. It contained one word done in heavy capitals:

_STUNG!_

For a few moments Andy gazed stupidly, unable for the time to understand that he had been made the victim of a hoax. While this was slowly dawning upon him, the door burst open and, with a yell of laughter, the crowd rushed into the hut.

Andy jumped as though he had been shot, and, scrambling out of the hole, stood with open mouth facing the laughing boys. His surprised and discomfited att.i.tude was so ludicrous that their laughter increased tenfold and they fairly shrieked.

"Wh-what's the big idea, anyway?" gasped Andy at last. "How did you fellows come to be here?"

"Well, you see," replied Morton, sobering down a little, "I counted on your doing the crooked thing and I wasn't mistaken."

"I'll get even with you some day," growled Andy. "You think you're pretty smart, don't you?"

"Since you ask me, I must admit I cherish some such idea," admitted Morton, his eyes twinkling. "The fellows from the city don't always know everything, you understand."

"You'll live to be sorry for this trick," bl.u.s.tered Andy. "You just see if you don't."

He made his way to the door and pa.s.sed out amid another burst of merriment from those who had witnessed his discomfiture, leaving his implements lying where he had thrown them.

An account of the affair spread quickly over the village and life for Andy became so unbearable that before another twenty-four hours he left the town.

In the natural course of events the story came to the ears of the boys at the lighthouse.

"I'd have given something to be there," declared Bill. "It must have been worth a year's allowance to see his face when all those fellows gave him the laugh. He thinks such a lot of himself that it must have been a bitter pill to swallow."

"Let alone his not finding what he went after," put in Fred. "It hit him in his pride and his pocketbook, and they're both sensitive spots with Andy."

"But how do you suppose he got wind of our being in search of treasure?"

queried Teddy.

"I was wondering at that," replied Lester, "and the only way I could figure it out is that he must have followed us the day we were at Bartanet, and heard what we were talking about when we were eating."

"Well," concluded Fred, "he couldn't have got anything of real value from what we said, or he wouldn't have gone digging in old Totten's shack. But it's up to us to put a padlock on our lips when there's any chance of being overheard. We may not be so lucky the next time."

CHAPTER XXVII

A FIGHTING CHANCE

"Only one week more now before we have to go back to Rally Hall," sighed Teddy one morning, just after they had risen from the breakfast table.

"And nothing done yet in the way of finding that chest of gold," groaned Fred.

"It's now or never," declared Lester with decision.

"I'm afraid it's never, then," put in Bill, the skeptical. "Here for days we've been blistering our hands and breaking our backs, to say nothing of racking what brains we have, and we're no nearer finding it than we were at the beginning."

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that," protested Fred. "We've at least explored a lot of places where there were no signs of the peculiar trees and rock shown in that map that Ross told us about. That leaves just so many fewer places to waste our time on, and makes it more likely that the next will be the right one."

"Not much nourishment in that," persisted Bill. "I'll admit that we've found plenty of places where the gold _isn't_, but that doesn't get us anywhere. And we'll be gray-headed before we can explore the whole coast of Maine."

"Oh, stop your grouching, you old sinner," exhorted Teddy, clapping him on the back. "This is like football or baseball. The game isn't over till after the last minute of play."

"That's the talk," cried Lester emphatically. "If we go down, we'll do it with the guns shotted and the band playing and the flag flying."

It was not to be wondered at that the lads were all a.s.sailed at times by the doubt and discouragement that troubled Bill acutely that morning.

They had taken advantage of every day when the sea permitted, and, as Teddy phrased it, had "raked the coast fore and aft." Their main reliance had been the map that had appeared in the story of the old sailor to Ross, and the first thing they did after entering any bay or cove was to look about them for the clump of two and three trees, with the big rock standing at the right. Once or twice they had found conditions that nearly answered this description, and they had dug and hunted near by, wherever the lay of the land held out any hope of success.

In the absence of anything better, this supposed map was their strongest clue. Yet even this was only supposition. It might not have been anything more than the fanciful sketch of an idle sailor. Or if it indeed were a map of any given locality, it might not refer in the slightest degree to the robbery by the crew of the smuggler.

The knowledge that this might be so had at times a paralyzing effect on the boys. They felt the lack of solid ground beneath their feet. Like the coffin of Mahomet, they were as though suspended between earth and sky.

Still, it was the only clue they had, and there was something in the make-up of these st.u.r.dy young Americans that made them desperately unwilling to confess defeat. It was the "die-in-the-last-ditch" spirit that has made America great. Even Bill, although he relieved himself sometimes by grumbling, would not really have given up the search and when the pinch came he dug and hunted as eagerly as the rest.

This morning, they had arranged to set off for a final cruise that might take up all the remaining time of their vacation, which was now drawing rapidly to a close. Their party was complete, with the exception of Ross. He had gone up to Oakland to spend a few days with his mother, who had arrived from Canada, but he had arranged to meet the boys that day at a point agreed on, about fifteen miles up the coast.

As their cruise was expected to be longer than usual, it took them some time before they had everything on board the _Ariel_ and were ready to cast off from the little pier below the lighthouse.

"Well," said Mr. Lee, who had come down to see them off, "good-by, boys, and luck go with you."

"Watch us come back with that chest of gold," called out Teddy gaily.

"I'll be watching, all right," grinned the lighthouse keeper, "and I have a sort of hunch that you boys will get there this time. You certainly have earned it, if you do lay your hands on it."

"And that's no merry jest, either," remarked Bill, as he looked at the callous spots on his hands.

"Bill wasn't made to work," scoffed Teddy. "He's made to sit on the box and crack the whip, while we common trash pull and strain in the shafts."