tell us what you think.”

“I think we’ll take an auto trip up toward Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence,” he said.

“Can Skinny go?” I asked him.

“Surest thing you know,” he said; “Skinny’ll go as first mate. You’ll go as ship’s cook, Grove will be a common seaman, and Pee-wee’ll be a very common seaman. If the wind is fair and we don’t have any squalls or blow-outs, I don’t see why we shouldn’t make the desert island of Steuben Junction by Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“Oh boy!” I said, “that’ll be great.”

great

Then he got kind of more serious and he said, “Now you kids listen to me. There may be a sequel to that affair, and then again there may not be. We’re going on an automobile trip, the five of us. On the way back, I’ll drop you off at Temple Camp, if you say, so you can join the rest of the bunch.

“We’ll take the Adirondack tour up as far as Watertown and see if we can dig up Steuben Junction, and then we’ll bang around in the woods. There’s just about chance enough of our finding something, to make the trip interesting. But we’re out for a good time, not for gold, just remember that. Then none of us will be disappointed. Understand, Pee-wee?”

Grove said, “Yes, but there were two bags of gold and when that fellow was discovered, he didn’t have them. They must be somewhere.”

“Unless he gave them to some poor family or to a hospital or an Old Ladies’ Home,” Harry said, awful funny like, “and I don’t just think he did. I don’t believe he was that kind of a train robber. I think the dirt on his knife meant something. It proved what, but it didn’t prove where. I think that when he found he couldn’t do much more than crawl and was getting weaker and weaker, he may have dug a hole and buried his gold, so he wouldn’t be caught with the goods. If he did, he buried some seeds, too. And that was twenty-five years ago. There may possibly be some sign now where there wasn’t any then. Get me? If we should happen to see a big tall pine in a neighborhood where there aren’t any other pines, why——”

what

where. I

any

“Oh boy, we’ll buy a big cabin cruiser,” Pee-wee yelled, “and we’ll donate about ten thousand dollars to Temple Camp and——”

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