“Gee, Fred, it was all right of you to do that!” put in Randy admiringly.
“Well, if I can’t go, I can’t, and that’s all there is to it,” remarked Gif. “And maybe Spouter and I will have a real good time up on the Maine coast. Anyway, I hope so.”
“How soon do you think we’ll find out for certain about this trip?” questioned Andy.
“Oh, I expect to know very soon,” answered his cousin. “The fact is, I’ve been holding off expecting every day either to get a letter from my dad or have him come up to the farm in person. That’s why I didn’t want to say anything before this. I wanted to be sure of what I was doing. Even as it is, the whole thing may fall through—and if it does, please don’t blame me.”
“We won’t blame you, Fred. You can be sure of that,” returned Jack. “We know you’ll be just as much disappointed as any of us. Just the same, I shouldn’t want Uncle Sam to put a lot of money in this expedition if the whole thing was a fake. It will cost a pile of dollars to put such a thing through.”
“I don’t think I’d go into that if I was your father until I had gone over this Captain Corning’s information very carefully,” remarked Spouter. “There are thousands of people all over this country who think they have special information concerning lost treasure ships and lost mines and lost everything else, and nine out of ten of these things are fakes pure and simple. I remember reading in an old magazine how miles and miles of coast line on Long Island and on Cape Cod had been dug up by people looking for pirates’ gold, and how they had even gone up into Newfoundland and down on the Brazil coast and down in Florida, not to say anything of the West Indies, and hunted over miles and miles of all sorts of territory. And then down in Central America and off the coast of Brazil and off the coast of Africa, too, there have been expeditions——”
“Hurrah, Spouter is giving us a lecture on Pirates’ Treasures!” burst in Jack gayly. “Why didn’t you hand it in as a theme when we were at good old Colby, Spouter? You might have gotten one hundred and one per cent. on it.”
“Oh, say! you make me forget what I was talking about,” was the reply. “Just the same, as I said before, this treasure game is a good deal of a fake.”
“Well, anyway, we’ll have a dandy outing if we start looking for that lost Margarita,” came from Fred.