Whew! Think of that. There we were sitting on that sand bar with a whole million dollars buried within a few feet of us. It had been there nobody knows how long. Folks had walked over it, and maybe dug clams right over it, and sat down on top of it—and never even guessed they could have uncovered all that money just by digging a little.
Another week or two passed, and then we heard a racket outside and yelling, and then a couple of men chucked Mr. House into the tent and followed him in and sat on him a little until he got reasonable, and tied him to the tent pole in the space between Mr. Dunn and me. It was kind of crowded, but he didn’t act like he minded the crowd.
As soon as he could speak he began quite a speech with lots of language in it. As near as I could gather, he wanted to know what in tunket was going on.
“Mutiny,” says Mr. Dunn. “The men have mutinied and they’re going to seize the treasure and the yacht.”
“No!” says Mr. House. Then he craned his neck to look at me and Catty. “Where’d you pick up these confounded kids?”
“They,” says Mr. Dunn, “are the heroes.”
“They’ve been heroing around ever since we started on this cruise. It was the skinniest one that we got the chart from.”
“No!” says Mr. Dunn.
“That didn’t work out like we expected,” says Catty, kind of apologetic. “I’ll tell you about that, now that it’s over. It all happened because Mr. Topper didn’t take us into his confidence right at the start. Of course we saw something was going on, and we figured out you were pirates, following us in that black yacht. Then we got onto the treasure, and knew that was what you were after. We weren’t sure till Newport, when we saw Mr. House send you a telegram.”
“Huh,” says Mr. House.