“The four of you,” the speaker went on, “could have handled Bid and the other kid without a particle of trouble, keeping them from sounding an outcry. But I don’t suppose you ever thought of such a commonplace scheme as that.”
“No,” I admitted.
In looking back I can truthfully agree with Dad to the point that our ghost trick was somewhat of a crazy mess. And the wonder to me is that it worked as well as it did. I don’t believe that any boy could fool me with a shallow trick like that. Still, a fellow should be slow to brag on himself ahead of time. For, in all truth, as I have found out from experience, it is hard to always foretell what one is liable to do if caught unprepared. And if I had been in Bid Stricker’s boots, so to speak, it isn’t improbable that I would have lost my head as completely as he did.
Anyway, to sum up, I have no regrets that we took the more exciting course of recovering the buried treasure as considered against the safer course. For we had fun … up to the point where the snapper got a whack at me. What we did that night makes better reading, I think, than [[210]]what Dad would have done. So, as I say, with the interests of my story in mind, I am glad that Scoop, and not the elder, was the leader.
Well, as I left off in the preceding chapter, the snapper and I did a sort of spirited loop-the-loop down the sandy side of the hill. And having successfully skinned four noses and eleven elbows and seven ears, all of which belonged to me, we landed in a sort of tangle at the foot of the incline.
In the rough-and-tumble descent the snapper had cheerfully gagged up my leg, probably of the opinion that life in my company was much too exciting for one of its staid temperament. And as I sort of untwisted my arms and legs from around my neck, I was treated to a sight of my late toe crusher stiffly retreating to the water on long brisk legs. Its whole expression was one of outraged indignation. And I doubt not that to this day it tells its gaping grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren a pitiful story of how a sort of demonic combination of legs and arms and white nightshirt and rope hair tried to fiendishly murder it by stomping on it and rolling on it and stuffing its eyes full of scenery and sand burs. And in the times when I am abroad in the canal [[211]]it isn’t improbable, in fancy, that I am the unknown target of many pairs of venomous young-snapper eyes, whose hard-shelled clannish owners haven’t forgiven me for what I did in cold blood to “poor old grandpop.”
But I should worry about “poor old grandpop.” For he certainly did a plenty to me.
As can be imagined I had made a much livelier and hence quicker descent of the hill than Bid Stricker and his galloping followers. And having been able to keep my senses in a bundle in the time that I was skidding through the sand burs, first on one ear and then on the other, I wasn’t more than a handful of seconds getting to my feet when I arrived, so to speak, at the end of the car line.
Somewhere on the whirling hillside, between me and the spinning moon, the enemy was shouting and pounding their way through the hazel brush. In view of their very determined and businesslike actions, it plainly was important to my safety, I decided, to do some brisk leg stretching in the direction of the rowboat.
But where was the blamed boat? I had lost all sense of directions. The moon, now sensibly quieted down, was the only thing within range of my eyes that was properly in place. Certainly [[212]]the hill that I had just separated company with had turned itself around. I had accompanied the snapper down the east slope, yet here I was at the foot of the west slope—or was it the north slope? No matter, I wasn’t to be fooled. The hill had turned around and I knew it.