Two months ago William and his friends had been fired with the idea of digging for hidden treasure. From various books they had read (“Ralph the Reckless,” “Hunted to Death,” “The Quest of Captain Terrible,” etc.), they had gathered that the earth is chockful of buried treasure if only one takes the trouble to dig deep enough.
They had resolved to dig every inch of their native village, collect all the treasure they found, and with it buy a desert island on which they proposed to spend the rest of their lives unhampered by parents and schoolmasters.
They had decided to begin with the uncultivated part of Ginger’s back garden, and to buy further land for excavation with the treasure they found in the back garden.
Their schemes were not narrow. They had decided to purchase and to pull down all the houses in the village as their treasure grew and more and more land was required for digging.
But they had dug unsuccessfully for two months in Ginger’s back garden and were beginning to lose heart. They had not realised that digging was such hard work, or that ten feet square of perfectly good land would yield so little treasure. Conscientiously they carried on the search, but it had lost its first fine careless rapture, and they were glad of any excuse for avoiding it.
“Dig in your back garden with all those Sale of Work people messin’ about interruptin’ and gettin’ in the way?” said William sternly. “Not much!”
“All right,” said Ginger relieved. “I only s’gested it. Well, shall we hunt for smugglers?”
*****
There was a cave in the hillside just beneath the road, and though the village in which William and Ginger lived was more than a hundred miles inland, William and Ginger were ever hopeful of finding a smuggler or, at any rate, traces of a smuggler, in the cave. They searched it carefully every day.
As William said, “’S’only likely the reely cunnin’ ones wouldn’t stay sittin’ in their caves by the sea all the time. They’d know folks’d be on the look out for ’em there. They’d bring their things here where no one’d expect ’em. Why, with a fine cave like this there’s sure to be smugglers.”