"No!" cried the girls.
"Yes."
"Oh, tell us all about it," urged the girls again, just as eager to hear the particulars as though it were a story out of a book. And it did sound like a story; only Billy Long was much too much in earnest to make it up. Besides, he had learned a lesson during his weeks of "hiding out."
"I was scart—of course I was," he said. "What fellow wouldn't be? That detective from the store said they'd put me in jail till I'd told—and I'd been tellin' him the truth right along.
"So I got up early that morning to go fishing. I knew where the white perch were thick as sprats. I got Mr. Norman's boat; but I knew he wouldn't mind. And I went over to Boulder Head. As I was starting to fish I heard two men talking just in the mouth of the old cavern. They were quarreling. I guess they must have been foreigners; I couldn't understand all they said. But I got enough of their broken-English talk to understand that one of them had hidden some money in a tight-covered lard can, and part of the money the other fellow claimed."
Dora pinched Dorothy, and looked at her knowingly. But it wasn't until afterward that Dorothy understood what her twin meant by that.
"So I got interested in them, believing that they might be the real burglars, and I forgot the boat. When they went away and I went back to the boat, the old thing had filled and sunk. You never could row that boat to the island without bailing her out a couple of times; and I ought to have dragged her ashore.
"So I couldn't get the boat up, and I thought I'd stop there. I had some fishing tackle, and matches, and some crackers. I camped in the cave for a couple of days, and had fires, and cooked fish. But, my goodness! fish gets awful tasteless when you don't have any salt and pepper.
"There were berries," continued Billy, "and I managed to get along. Then, I washed out my old bait bucket and at night I went down to the pasture of that park superintendent and milked his old mooley cow. I got along.
"One of those men was always hanging about in the woods, though, and that kept me scared. But I tried to watch him. Didn't know but he'd go to the place where he'd buried the money in the lard can. But he went off after a while and I didn't see him again.