Well, Catty and I had our own idea about that, but we didn’t say so. I told Catty I thought we ought to tell how we had sent the Porpoise off on a wild-goose chase to Nantucket, but he said to keep my mouth tight closed about it.
“We aren’t supposed to know anything about this treasure, or whatever it is,” says he, “and nobody’s asked us to help. What we know we’ve found out for ourselves, and until they ask us, or tell us about it, it wouldn’t be good manners for us to say anything.”
“Maybe,” says I, “but it don’t seem like very good manners to go butting in like we have, then.”
“That’s different,” says he. “You don’t have to be introduced to a drowning man before you can jump in and save him. Here we find these men in a fix, and we do the best we can to pull them out, but that doesn’t entitle us to let on we’ve discovered a secret they want to keep from us.”
I couldn’t see it that way, and I didn’t make any sense out of the way he reasoned it, but there it was, and I didn’t want to start an argument. We had plenty of argument aboard with Naboth and Rameses III.
“I wonder if Captain Kidd buried this treasure,” says I, because I liked to talk about it. It got me kind of excited to talk about treasure and pirates and digging in lonely places where you might run into a skeleton with his finger pointing to a chest. Catty liked it, too, but he let on he didn’t.
“Huh,” says he.
“A chest full of pieces-of-eight—whatever they are—and gold cups and jewels and all that. I hope they let us come along when they dig it up, don’t you?”
“When who digs up what?” says Mr. Browning, who just came up out of the cabin without our hearing him.
“Why,” says Catty, “if you and Mr. Topper were going to dig for buried treasure, Wee-wee and I thought we’d like to go along.”