“And I persuaded myself it was only a piece of glass or a bright shell!” she exclaimed from time to time, having the feminine trick of reverting to mistakes. “Can you make out the date on it?” she demanded very practically after one such reversion.
“No, I can’t!” Stack examined the coin more critically than he had yet taken the time to do in his frantic eagerness to find more. “The last figures look like a 3 and an 8. But it might be 1638 or 1838—date’s partly worn off. Houp-la! wasn’t it somewhere about 1638 that Captain Kidd was flourishing? My history’s hazy. Gee—if we’re on the track of some of his buried treasure when other people have been digging for ages and consulting all sorts of fake fortune-tellers and never even got upon the trail of a hoard!”
“We consulted the Indian top.” Kenjo’s voice had a thrill of semi-superstition.
“Yes, but the Kullibígan couldn’t make up its mind which of us would dig up a fortune from the sands; you came in on it, so did I, so did Arline—that’s nothing!” Thus Jessica laughed him down. “Wait a minute!” She caught at Miles’s arm. “I want to see if I can make out more of the inscription before you put it—the coin—back into your pocket again. You needn’t be so afraid that some one is going to snap it out of your hand!” haughtily.
Thus shamed, Stack suspended digging for an age-long interval of a minute and held the coin on lingering exhibition, right and obverse sides.
“Oh! isn’t it a dandy sunburst, with stars above it?” So Jessica gloated over its ancient stamp. “I can partly make out the inscription over the sunburst, too: it’s Repub—then something else, and then Peruana. I can read that clearly, but not the rest.”
“Underneath the letters look like CUZCO,” spelled out Kenjo. “And—oh! don’t be stingy, Stack; let’s look at it a minute longer—and in the middle of the sunburst there are a few black dots that seem to be meant for the two eyes, the nose and mouth of a face—a queer sun-face! Oh! Ha! Ha!” Ken’s boyish laugh rang out with a fire that matched his hair.
“Now for the reverse side: the ship is on that,” pleaded Jessica hungrily.
“Yes, and the volcano and the horn—an’ something like a castle!” muttered Miles. “But we’re wasting time!” The coin vanished again into his pocket. “It’s me for digging, I tell you—digging hard! If we can find some more—a hoard of them—our fortune’s made.... I’d be glad to have my fortune made for me,” he continued, presently, out of the heart of a sand-spout; “I enter ‘Tech’ in the fall and for the next four years I’ll have to work all vacation-time in order to push myself through—help pay college expenses. Oh, goody, if this coin and others would only lend me a boost!”
“I need a ‘boost,’ as you call it, too; I’ll have to earn my own living when I graduate from high school, with no one to help me,” quavered Jessica, shivering all over in her wetness, beginning to realize that, back of frenzied excitement, she was very clammy and exhausted. “And—and I can’t earn my living in the way I’d like to do unless I get hold of some money!” She fell to scratching like a wet hen.