"It keeps falling apart," mourned Meg; and indeed the place looked worse every time they visited it.
"Apples!" shouted Bobby, running forward to look under the gnarled trees. "Apples, Meg! Big ones!"
"They're not ripe," said Meg promptly. "'Sides, they're not ours—they belong to Mr. Harley. Daddy says everything here belongs to him."
"I guess they are green," admitted Bobby, who had tried in vain to soften one in his fingers. "But apples belong to anybody, Meg."
"They do not!" contradicted Meg. "Why, Bobby Blossom! how can you talk like that? Don't you remember when you and Twaddles were in the fruit store with Daddy last Spring and Twaddles took a strawberry from one of the boxes because he saw another boy do it? You know Daddy made him put it back before he could eat it. If strawberries don't belong to anybody, I guess apples don't."
Meg's honest blue eyes looked beseechingly at her brother.
"All right," surrendered Bobby. "I wasn't going to eat 'em, anyway."
"I hope not," said Meg severely. "What'll we play?"
"Hunting for treasure," responded Bobby. "That's why I brought the shovel. You want to pound first?"
Meg and Bobby had invented this game. They pretended that hundreds of years ago fierce pirates had buried chests of gold and jewels on this end of the island and that the Harley shack had been the castle home of these wicked sea rovers. The pirates had died without leaving directions to tell where they had buried the treasure, and gradually the castle had crumbled away.