I started to crawl out when my hand grabbed onto something hard and I pulled at it. Whatever it was came loose and I tossed it out.
“What’s that,” says I. “Maybe it’s good to eat.”
“Looks like an old tin chart case,” says he. “Must have drifted ashore and got buried in the sand.”
We looked at it as best we could in the moonlight. It was a tin tube about three feet long and maybe three inches in diameter, and there was a water-tight cap at the end that opened. “Huh,” says I, “I’d rather have found a beefsteak—all smothered with onions.”
“Probably off some wreck,” says Catty, “and full of old charts. No good to anybody.”
“Tell you what,” I says, “let’s pretend it’s the chart to a treasure. We’ve been hunting for it, and just as we find it, the pirates get on our trail, and we can’t use it to go find all the buried gold. So we have to hide it again. Hurry. They’re after us. Get down and sneak along like they were all around and we were like to run into one any minute.”
So we went along hiding behind bushes and clumps of grass and such like, and making believe the place was as crowded with pirates as a county-fair grounds is with farmers.
“It’s funny those pirates didn’t find these maps,” says I, “when they were digging. I picked this right out of the hole they dug.”
“Just luck,” says Catty. “They _almost_ found it. It was right on the edge of their digging, I guess, and when the rain washed the sand down it was uncovered. Mighty lucky, wasn’t it?”
“Mighty lucky it wasn’t the real treasure,” says I, “that Mr. Topper is so hot after.”
Well, we kept going along till we came to a little tumbledown shanty that Catty said he guessed had been used for a fisherman’s shack once, and we stopped there and rested.
“Here would be a good place to hide our treasure map,” says he.
“Have to do it scientific,” says he. “Let’s see. Um.... Start at the corner of the cabin toward town and walk eleven paces. Then face the lighthouse off there on the end of the claw and walk fifteen paces.” I did it. “Now face the light at the entrance to the harbor and walk nine paces,” says he, and I did that.
“There,” he says, “dig a hole and bury it.”
So with our hands, we scraped a hole and stuck in the old chart case and buried it and smoothed over the spot.