Had he chanced to glance at the little window, his labors might have come to a premature conclusion. Grouped outside were Morton and his friends, almost bursting with smothered laughter. The sight of Andy, whose antipathy to work was well known, sweating away over the hardest kind of labor, amused them immensely.
Wholly unconscious of the amusement he was providing, Andy resumed his task and worked with such good will that it was not long before his spade struck on the edge of the buried trunk. He uttered a shout of delight and scattered the remaining sand in every direction. Before long he had uncovered the top of the trunk. This he tried to lift out of the hole. Finding it too heavy for this, however, and not able to restrain his impatience to see what it contained, he seized the pickax and smashed in the top.
His chagrin may be imagined when instead of the treasure he expected he found that the trunk was filled with sand. On top of this was a sheet 209 of paper which Morton had placed there the previous evening. It contained one word done in heavy capitals:
STUNG!
For a few moments Andy gazed stupidly, unable for the time to understand that he had been made the victim of a hoax. While this was slowly dawning upon him, the door burst open and, with a yell of laughter, the crowd rushed into the hut.
Andy jumped as though he had been shot, and, scrambling out of the hole, stood with open mouth facing the laughing boys. His surprised and discomfited attitude was so ludicrous that their laughter increased tenfold and they fairly shrieked.
“Wh-what’s the big idea, anyway?” gasped Andy at last. “How did you fellows come to be here?”
“Well, you see,” replied Morton, sobering down a little, “I counted on your doing the crooked thing and I wasn’t mistaken.”
“I’ll get even with you some day,” growled Andy. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“Since you ask me, I must admit I cherish some such idea,” admitted Morton, his eyes twinkling. “The fellows from the city don’t always know everything, you understand.”