“Here’s where the pirates were digging,” says I. “The rain’s caved in the sides of their hole.”
I started to crawl out when my hand grabbed onto something hard and I pulled at it. Whatever it was came loose and I tossed it out.
“What’s that,” says I. “Maybe it’s good to eat.”
“Looks like an old tin chart case,” says he. “Must have drifted ashore and got buried in the sand.”
We looked at it as best we could in the moonlight. It was a tin tube about three feet long and maybe three inches in diameter, and there was a water-tight cap at the end that opened. “Huh,” says I, “I’d rather have found a beefsteak—all smothered with onions.”
“Probably off some wreck,” says Catty, “and full of old charts. No good to anybody.”
“Let’s save it,” says I.
“What’s the use,” says he.
“Tell you what,” I says, “let’s pretend it’s the chart to a treasure. We’ve been hunting for it, and just as we find it, the pirates get on our trail, and we can’t use it to go find all the buried gold. So we have to hide it again. Hurry. They’re after us. Get down and sneak along like they were all around and we were like to run into one any minute.”
So we went along hiding behind bushes and clumps of grass and such like, and making believe the place was as crowded with pirates as a county-fair grounds is with farmers.