“How can a river move?” he whispered, because one of the librarians had her eye on him.

“That’s all a river ever does,” I told him; “did you ever know a river to stand still?”

So we hunted it up in the Atlas and sure enough, there it was, away up near Alaska and, good night, there was a river named the Dahadinee flowing into it.

“We’ve got the treasure; We’ve got the treasure!” Pee-wee began shouting.

“Shh!” I told him. “Don’t you know you’re in the library? Shhh.”

CHAPTER VI—WE GET NEW LIGHT ON THE MYSTERY

That night Grove and Pee-wee and I hiked over to Harry Donnelle’s house, to show him what we had copied about the poplar that we thought must be the kind of a one that was meant in the letter.

I said, “There isn’t any such tree as the Dahadinee poplar in any of the books, but I think it must be the same as the Mackenzie poplar, because the Dahadinee River is up that way.”

“Sure,” Harry said; “I guess it’s just a nickname for one of those skyscraper pines that you never see south of Canada. I shot a Canada lynx up one of them on Hudson Bay; they puncture the sky, those things.” Cracky, that fellow’s been everywhere.

Grove said, “How is it going to do us any good?”

“Well, I don’t know that it is,” Harry said; “and I’m not buying a yacht on the strength of it, either. But I had a kind of an idea that we might bang into the woods north of Steuben Junction—that’s up near the Canadian border about forty or fifty miles north of Watertown.”

I said, “I guess that’s a pretty lonely country, hey?”

“Oh, the people wear clothes up that way and live in houses,” he said, “but it isn’t exactly like Broadway and Forty-second Street.”

Pee-wee looked kind of disappointed; I guess he thought that it was like South Africa up there. “Maybe it isn’t so terribly civilized,” he said.

“Well, it’s more civilized than where the Dahadinee poplar grows, you can be sure of that,” Harry said, “so don’t think that we’re going to pull any Christopher Columbus stunt. Everything up there has been discovered.”

“Not the treasure!” Pee-wee shouted.

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