“A regular ‘chestnut,’” yawned Penelope, who was getting sleepy.
“Well! isn’t a ‘chestnut yarn’ the best kind to anchor to with a hope of its coming true?” Kenjo appealed to the Guardian with a fire that matched his ruddy hair. “At least”—muttering low—“I think I learned in high school that some old fellow said that.”
“He said a ‘platitude’ was; I’m not sure but that they’re one and the same thing,” replied Gheezies, with a smile.
“Ah, but we’ve something to anchor to besides a ‘chestnut’—Stack and I!” Kenneth Jordan, second-class Scout, thrust his fiery head close to Jessica’s and spoke in a hollow voice of mystery scarcely to be heard in the firelit twilight beyond her ear, although Sesooā, on the other side of him, caught crumbs of the confidence. “We said we wouldn’t tell anybody lest they’d laugh at us for digging.” The Scout became a husky shell for his secret. “But I guess, maybe, Stack won’t mind my telling you as you helped him save that dumb child. He an’ I”—the secret began to crack the shell—“he an’ I were down on the Neck yesterday,” jerking an elbow in the direction of the sand-bar at the river’s mouth, “and there was an old man there, hunting big hen-clams, at low tide; he told us he was over ninety; we asked him how long he expected to live an’ he said: ‘Down here, you live as long as you want to!’”
“Is that the secret?”
There was a shout from the girls. Ken’s voice had risen like the tide upon the old clam-hunter’s words. It sank mysteriously again.
“We asked him, too”—the secret was popping out now in Jessica’s favored ear—“whether he believed there was treasure hidden along that beach or among the dunes. He said, ‘Sure as a hen-clam hops there is!’ Then he put his face close to Stack’s—he hadn’t a tooth—and pointed to a certain spot among the dunes and said that a few years ago (we dug out of him that ’twas about thirty) a handful of old gold and silver coins had been picked up there. We pumped him further, but his mind wandered, he didn’t seem able to pin it long to anything, he only mumbled and shuffled off after a big hen-clam—surf-clam, you know—that tried to get away from him by hopping off on its one funny little leg that it thrust out of the shell. ’Twas the queerest thing you ever saw to watch him trying to rake it up with his iron fork.”
“Must ha’ been! A hopping clam!” This set Penny giggling, for the Scout’s voice had risen again upon the irrelevant matter of the aged clam-hunter’s raking among the treasures left by the last high tide.
Her paroxysm brought Kenjo to himself and to his manners, set him diffidently apologizing to the Guardian for daring to drop a secret within her magic ring, at the other end of her firelit circle.
“Stack’d go for me for doing such a thing,” he gasped. “I guess I put my foot in it, too, like Fatty! Well! here goes for pumping the guessing-top about that treasure!”