"I believe Strong found it, after all," said Jack—"found it in five minutes in the very first hole he made."
"If I thought that I would go to Siberia after him," I said, "and screw his neck till he gave it up."
"My dear man, he couldn't take a load of treasure with him to Siberia!" said Jack. "The authorities would have it in a minute."
"It might be all in one cheque," said I; "and he's hidden it—swallowed it, or put it in his boot or something."
"Well, you can't very well follow him to Siberia with a stomach-pump in one hand and your revolver in the other," laughed Jack; "but you may bet, if he had found the stuff he would not have been so quarrelsome; he would have been too pleased with himself to rush straight at these poor peasants and empty his revolver at their heads!"
This seemed true, and we turned our thoughts once more to the invention of devices that might have occurred to the old man for the more ingenious concealment of his treasures. It could scarcely be supposed that the old miser really desired to defeat altogether the ingenuity of his heirs, should they prove to be in possession of a quantum of that commodity; for if it had been his intention to deprive us altogether of the money, he need never have made us his potential heirs. The money must be here—that was as good as certain.
Then we tested other geometrical designs. We counted as many feet towards the middle, from each post in turn, as the old man had lived years, seventy-one; and we dug deeply at each seventy-first foot. We turned up the soil at the spot where fell the only shadow of the day—the shadow of a tall pine whose topmost boughs afforded us a few feet of shade towards evening; but nothing came of it. We tried many other devices, each more deeply ingenious, not to say "far-fetched," than the last; but the third day drooped and faded, and still we were no wiser than before.
That night Michail returned to camp, looking as though he had passed through great tribulation and had been making good resolutions. He slunk in and lay down by the fire, and slept so soundly that no ordinary artillery firing a royal salute at his ear would have disturbed him.
We were sorry to see Michail, for we did not desire his presence here. We wished we had another flask for him.
This wish was redoubled when in the morning, as we dug and delved—toiling and perspiring and almost despairing, though still manfully playing up to the motto of my own family crest: "Dum spiro spero" (which Jack translated "Stick to it, boys, till you're pumped!")—while Michail still slept, the elder appeared suddenly upon the scene. He too bore traces of bacchanalianism, though he did not seem to have suffered so severely from the malady as Michail. The elder was surprised to see us working, and asked us what we were about.