“I’ve got it,” said Dick, to himself, deeply shamed. “Moonlight, poetry, mit-holding, and all the rest of it. Never having had it before, it’s going hard with me. Why in the devil wasn’t I taught to write doggerel when I was in college? A fellow don’t stand any show nowadays unless he’s a pocket edition of Byron.”
He went on through the orchard at a run, instinctively healing a troubled mind by wearying the body. At the outer edge of it, he paused.
Suspended by a singularly strong bit of twine, a small, grinning skull hung from the lower branch of an apple tree, far out on the limb. “Cat’s skull,” thought Dick. “Wonder who hung it up there?”
He lingered, idly, for a moment or two, then observed that a small patch of grass directly underneath it was of that season’s growth. His curiosity fully awake, he determined to dig a bit, though he had dug fruitlessly in many places since he came to the Jack-o’-Lantern.
“Uncle couldn’t do anything conventional,” he said to himself, “and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want any of his relations to have his money. Here goes, just for luck!”
He went back to the barn for the spade, which already had fresh earth on it—the evidence of an early morning excavation privately made by Mrs. Smithers in a spot where she had dreamed gold was hidden. He went off to the orchard with it, whistling, his progress being furtively watched with great interest by the sour-faced handmaiden in the kitchen.
Back in the orchard again, he worked feverishly, possessed by a pleasant thrill of excitement, somewhat similar to that conceivably enlivening the humdrum existence of Captain Kidd. Dick was far from surprised when his spade struck something hard, and, his hands trembling with eagerness, he lifted out a tin box of the kind commonly used for private papers.
It was locked, but a twist of his muscular hands sufficed to break it open. Then he saw that it was a spring lock, and that, with grim, characteristic humour, Uncle Ebeneezer had placed the key inside the box. There were papers there—and money, the coins and bills being loosely scattered about, and the papers firmly sealed in an envelope addressed “To Whom it May Concern.”
Dick counted the coins and smoothed out the bills, more puzzled than he had ever been in his life. He was tempted to open the envelope, but refrained, not at all sure that he was among those whom it concerned. For the space of half an hour he stood there, frowning, then he laughed.
“I’ll just put it back,” he said to himself. “It’s not for me to monkey with Uncle Ebeneezer’s purposes.”