Grove said, “How is it going to do us any good?”
“Well, I don’t know that it is,” Harry said; “and I’m not buying a yacht on the strength of it, either. But I had a kind of an idea that we might bang into the woods north of Steuben Junction—that’s up near the Canadian border about forty or fifty miles north of Watertown.”
I said, “I guess that’s a pretty lonely country, hey?”
“Oh, the people wear clothes up that way and live in houses,” he said, “but it isn’t exactly like Broadway and Forty-second Street.”
Pee-wee looked kind of disappointed; I guess he thought that it was like South Africa up there. “Maybe it isn’t so terribly civilized,” he said.
“Well, it’s more civilized than where the Dahadinee poplar grows, you can be sure of that,” Harry said, “so don’t think that we’re going to pull any Christopher Columbus stunt. Everything up there has been discovered.”
“Not the treasure!” Pee-wee shouted.
“Now you kids listen to me,” Harry said, “and don’t fall off the railing—especially Pirate Harris.” He said that, because we were all sitting along the railing of the porch. He was sitting in a wicker chair, tilted back, and his feet stuck up on the railing.
“When I was in the city to-day,” he said, “I went into the big library situated in the dark morass on Fifth Avenue. Groping my way along its dark passages, I escaped the savage bookworms and ferocious authors who frequent its silent lairs, and made my way unobserved to the underground cave where the newspaper files are. Shh!
“There I examined the New York Chronicle of March eighth and ninth and tenth, eighteen ninety-five. You remember that old Hickory wrote his letter on March seventh? Well, here’s a sort of condensed version of a newspaper article that I found. Don’t fall backward Pee-wee, or you’ll go plunk into the rose bush. Now listen.”