"Well, what if it has?" asked Ruby, wondering, and a little impatient.
"Somebody might have hidden something there," said Tilly, whose longing to find the spoons was evidently desperate.
"Some of the miser's treasures or his clothes-line booty," cried Ruby, gayly, for miser Jensen was suspected of petty thieving, and Butternut Corner breathed more freely when his summer sojourn was over. "Girls, let's pry the stone up!"
"I tried to, alone, but I couldn't," said Tilly, eagerly bringing a long stake from the tumble-down fence.
The three girls tried for a long time with their united strength. The stone was flat and not very heavy, but was unwieldy, while Tramp, let out of the house, barked and capered with excitement in spite of his injured leg.
When at last the stone was overturned, there was indeed something snugly tucked into a hole dug beneath it--a bundle tied up in a bandana handkerchief. Miser Jensen always wore old-fashioned bandana handkerchiefs. When the girls opened it they found it filled, not with spoils of the Butternut Corner clothes-lines, but with watches and jewelry, most of it marked with the name of Burton, the Bymport jeweller, whom Dave Perley and Alf Coombs were suspected of having robbed.
"It was miser Jensen who robbed the store! Tilly, don't you see what it means? No one can ever say it was the boys again!"
Tilly trembled in all her thin little frame, but her face was alight with joy. "I know where they are! I can tell now," she said, proudly, "Alf wrote to me. They are both in my cousin's store in L----; it's a jewelry store. It was because Alf liked to see watches and things fixed that he was always at Burton's, and so they suspected him. Dave didn't want to be a minister or a farmer; that was why he ran away, but he wants to come home; he says it doesn't pay to run away; and now he can!"
All the cloud lifted from Butternut Hill. Patty could go home and tell Uncle Reuben and Aunt Eunice; it seemed to her too good to be true.
They forgot all about the spoons; even Tilly forgot them. And when Aunt Eunice heard the good news, she said she didn't care anything about the spoons, but she would do everything she could to make amends to Tilly Coombs for the unjust suspicions.