Miss Camilla sat forward in renewed excitement, her eye-glasses brushed awry. “Why, of course! Of course! I’ve never thought of it. Not once since I read this letter. The other was so much more important. But naturally that is what they must have done,—hidden them to keep them safe. They never, never would have disposed of them in any other way or for any other reason. But where in the world can that place be? ‘Right hand side from the house behind 27’ means nothing at all—to me!”
“Well, it does to me!” suddenly exclaimed Sally, the natural-born treasure-hunter of them all. “Where else could they hide anything so safely as in that cave or tunnel? Nobody would ever suspect in the world. And I somehow don’t think it meant the cave. I believe it means somewhere in the tunnel, on the right hand side as you enter from the cellar.”
“But what about 27?” demanded Miss Camilla. “That doesn’t seem to mean anything, does it?”
“No, of course it doesn’t mean anything to you, because you haven’t been through the tunnel, and wouldn’t know. But every once in a while, along the sides, are planks from that old vessel, put there to keep the sides more firm, I guess. There must be seventy-five or a hundred on each side. Now I believe it means that if we look behind the twenty-seventh one from the cellar entrance, on the right hand side, we’ll find the—the things hidden there.”
Then Miss Camilla rose, the light of younger days shining adventurously in her eyes.
“If that’s the case, we’ll go and dig them out tomorrow!” she announced gaily.
CHAPTER XIV
THE REAL BURIED TREASURE
IT had been a very dull day indeed for Genevieve. Had she been able to communicate her feelings adequately, she would have said she was heartily sick and tired of the program she had been obliged to follow. As she sat solitary on the porch of Miss Camilla’s tiny abode, thumb in mouth and tugging at the lock of hair with her other hand, she thought it all over resentfully.
Why should she be commanded to sit here all by herself, in a spot that offered no attractions whatever, told, nay, commanded not to move from the location, when she was bored beyond expression by the entire proceeding? True, they had left her eatables in generous quantities, but she had already disposed of these, and as for the picture-books of many attractive descriptions, given her to while away the weary hours, they were an old story now, and the afternoon was growing late. She longed to go down to the shore and play in the rowboat, and dabble her bare toes in the water, and indulge in the eternally fascinating experiment of catching crabs with a piece of meat tied to a string and her father’s old crab-net. What was the use of living when one was doomed to drag out a wonderful afternoon on a tiny, hopelessly uninteresting porch out in the backwoods? Existence was nothing but a burden.
True, the morning had not been without its pleasant moments. They had rowed up the river to their usual landing-place, a trip she always enjoyed, though it had been somewhat marred by the fear that she might be again compelled to burrow into the earth like a mole, forsaking the glory of sunshine and sparkling water for the dismal dampness of that unspeakable hole in the ground. But, to her immense relief, this sacrifice was not required of her. Instead, they had made at once through the woods and across the fields to Miss Camilla’s, albeit burdened with many strange and, to her mind, useless tools and other impedimenta.