"If it's anywhere it's in the Kanaka graveyard," says I. "I'll go bail it's within ten feet of where we found his dead body."
I was ashamed to tell him I hadn't even thought of the money, being struck all of a heap, and always powerful fond of Old Dibs.
"It would serve you right if I made you dig up the whole graveyard, single-handed," said Tom; "and if you had a spark of proper feeling, Bill Hargus, you'd fall on your knees and beg my parding for having acted like such a damned ninny!"
I would have answered him back in his own coin if I hadn't felt so bad about it all, and rattled, besides. I had punched Tom's head often and often, and he had punched mine; but I was staggered by the money being missing, and the loss of it just seemed to swallow up everything else. Somehow, it had never seemed _my_ money till then, and the more I felt it mine the more galling it was to give it up. Tom relented when he saw how cut up I was, withdrawing all the hard things he had said, and going on the other tack to cheer me up. He said he was just as big an ass as I was, and came out handsome about its being both our fault, and how it didn't matter a hill of beans anyway, for we'd soon get our spades on to it. It stood to reason it couldn't be far away or buried very deep, and a little fossicking with an iron ramrod would feel it out in no time.
Well, we gave Old Dibs a good send off, Tom and me making the coffin, and we buried him in a likely place to windward of the Kanaka graveyard. Tom wouldn't have him _inside_, for fear the natives might chance on the treasure themselves, and we put a neat fence around the place, with a priming and two coats of white paint, and a natty gate to go in by with brass hinges. The whole settlement turned out, Iosefo outdoing himself, and the king butting in with an address, and everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, as sailors say. We didn't have no flowers, and the whole business was sort of home-made and amateur, but Sarah made up for the lack of them by pegging out the grave with little poles, and streamers which gave quite a gay look to it, and fluttered in the wind, very pretty to see.
Then Tom and me started in our digging operations on a checkerboard plan, very systematic, with stakes where we left off, working by night so as not to rouse the natives' ill will. Or, I ought to have said, two nights, for I guess we didn't cover up our tracks sufficient, and they got on to it. We discovered this in the form of a depitation of chiefs and elders, who give us warning it had to stop ker-plunk! They said they wouldn't allow their graveyard torn up, and altogether acted very ugly and insulting. Tom and I had to sing small and put in a holiday neither of us wanted, for the Kanakas had the whip hand of us, and I never saw them so roused. Tom at first tried to carry it off with a high hand, informing them that he was a British subjeck, by God! and was they meaning to interfere with a British subjeck? But I couldn't see how that gave him any right to dig up Kanaka graveyards for money that didn't belong to him, and so I smoothed them down and out-talked Tom, saying it shouldn't happen again, and I was glad they had mentioned it!