“Let you?” cried Jolly Bill Hickey, “why he’ll be glad to have you get his map back! He wants that treasure—any man would, and he can’t tell where old Hank Denby hid it until he looks at the map. Of course he’ll be glad to have you get it back for him.”
“I don’t know that I can do it—or even find this man he suspects,” stated Bob.
“Well, you can have a try at it, anyhow,” decided Harry. “And you did pretty well down at Beacon Beach.”
“There was a lot of luck in that,” admitted Bob.
“Well, maybe luck will break here for you, too,” put in Jolly Bill. “I hope so, for Hiram’s sake.”
“But look here,” spoke out Ned. “Mr. Beegle must have opened his brass-bound box and have looked at the map inside between the time he got home with it and the time it was taken from him. And by looking at the map he must know where the stuff is buried.”
“That’s so,” agreed Harry.
“Not so fast!” exclaimed Jolly Bill. “It isn’t so easy to look at a map and then find the place it refers to. We found that out when we went to the South Sea island. You’ve got to have the map right with you, and work your course along fathom by fathom. Hiram would need the map to find where Hank had hid anything. Hank wouldn’t hide it in any easy place, or a place you could find by one look at the map. And Hiram didn’t have much time to study it.
“No, what I think, is that Rod heard, through the letter he got from Judge Weston, that everything had gone to Hiram. This made him mad and he decided to do things his own way, like he did once before when this happened to me,” and Jolly Bill tapped his wooden leg. “So he got the best of Hiram before Hiram had a chance to study the map. Rod has it now and he’ll dig up that treasure as soon as he gets the chance.”
“Do you think it’s buried around here?” asked Ned eagerly.