"Stuff buried when it was an acorn isn't much account now."
Not until after dark did the greedy crowd give up searching or cease to hope for hidden treasure where so much else was buried.
"No luck in this mound. Nothing but boys buried here."
Curled in his sleeping-blanket within the fort walls, Doby gave himself up to thoughts of the boys whose bones were once clothed with plumpness like his own. "I wonder if those boys started the fires in the earthwork watch-towers on the highest hills, where deep ashes show that countless fires have flashed in signal warning to other far-away towers."
In his dreams, he found himself running with the horde of young barbarians into a walled town. With them slamming shut great gates, heaving the bars in place, racing across the moat, hoisting aloft the drawbridge, barricading the second set of gates, covering stores of corn, herding women and children in huts of sod, catching blazing arrows. In scant fur garments, wild of hair, jingling his copper anklets, armed with spears and shouting an uncouth language, he pranced along the top of mountain mounds and defied a besieging enemy.
After such activity further sleep was impossible. Doby sat up, tied a knot in the corner of his blanket, and just before dawn mounted the sentry's ladder, wedged the knot in the slot between pickets, and lowered himself to the outside world.
Still under the spell of his fancies, he declared to himself, "Those boys would not vanish without leaving me something. They liked me first rate, even if they did all have to turn to bones. I'll go back where they are and do some digging."
He ran to the mound, seized one of the abandoned shovels, and dug and dug. The spectral light o' day gave him a chill sensation. The six or eight hundred years of weird memories grinning at him from the skulls in this desecrated tomb filled him with awe. But he was more inquisitive than he was nervous, so he made the shovel fly. In the loosened dirt, he used his fingers as a rake and dragged out funny old tobacco-pipes well worth the trouble of burrowing.
As the light grew stronger his fingers struck something different—the promise of a big find. He could not pull it out. He dared not use the clumsy shovel. He went through his pockets and found one of the hatchet-shaped stones he had picked up at the river's brink. He used it as a lever and gently pried out a knife. It was long and sharp and just the right weight for his hand.
Here was treasure indeed. Beautifully shaped, double-edged, an ancient poniard, a knife of flint!