We hid and waited for the guard to come along, and then we pounced out on him, and I guess he’d have been a pretty surprised guard if there’d been one at all. We knocked him down, and Mark sat on him and held his mouth shut while the rest of us tied him up tight. When he was taken care of Mark says, “Now for the treasure!” and commenced climbing up the ladder.
We all followed and scrambled through the little door in on top of the sawdust that the ice was packed in to keep it from melting during the summer. It was almost dark in there, and just like a great cavern.
“It’s g-g-gold!” shouts Mark, picking up a handful of sawdust and letting it run through his fingers. “Millions and millions of dollars worth of it. We’re rich men.” He said it just like some fellers we read about in a story of hidden treasure did. When they found theirs they got all excited and said lots of things like that, and Mark was always for doing things the way the books said.
I crawled over to the door to look down the precipice and see if our guard was still tied up all right, and I tell you I jerked in my head quick, for there was a man standing right at the foot of the ladder looking up, and he had the biggest dog with him I ever saw.
“Fellers,” I whispered, and I was scared, all right, “the guard’s got loose, and he’s waitin’ for us to come down with a trained lion to help him.”
They thought I was still playing, and partly I was, but the man was there, all right, as they saw when they looked. Pretty soon we knew he’d seen us, for he hollered, and his voice sounded old and mean and squeaky. “I got ye, all right, consarn ye. Come sneakin’ and spyin’ around a feller’s house, will you? I’ll learn ye what’s what ’fore I git shut of ye.” He waited a minute, then he spoke to the dog. “Watch, Obed, watch!” I thought that was a funny name for a dog. “Git ’em if they come down.” And then he went off leaving that whopper of a dog sitting right under us where he could gobble us if we came down.
“FELLERS, THE GUARD’S GOT LOOSE, AND HE’S WAITIN’ FOR US TO COME DOWN”
“Well!” says Plunk, like somebody had poked him between wind and water. “Well!”
We all crowded to the little door and looked down at the dog. He was lying with his muzzle between his paws, and it looked like he was all ready to go to sleep.