“A little sleep wouldn’t do me any harm,” says I.

“Go ahead and sleep,” says Catty.

“Maybe it can be done,” says I, “but I haven’t ever got used to sleeping on the corner of a case of canned corn. The difficulty,” says I, “is where to put my feet.”

“Um.... Let’s fix up a place to be comfortable,” says Catty. “It’s dark enough, and with this mutiny plot going on, nobody’s going to keep close watch. We’ll make us a cave,” says he.

“You go ahead,” says I, “and when it’s done call me.”

“I mean it,” says he. “We can shift these boxes, and kind of pile them around, and make a space in the middle big enough to lie down in. It’ll be safer, too. Kind of a hiding place.”

“All right,” says I. “Commence.”

It turned out to be easier than I thought. We just shifted cases and rucked them away cautious and piled them in a tier around a spot about five feet square, right slam in the middle of the pile. It took a half an hour, because we had to work slow and be careful not to make any noise. When it was done Catty says, “I’ll take the first watch and you snooze. In two hours I’ll wake you and it’ll be your watch.”

So I cuddled up on the sand and shut my eyes. At first the sand felt kind of soft and comfortable. Pretty soon it wasn’t so soft, and then it started to get hard. In fifteen minutes it was harder than any rock I ever heard of. It was a mean hard—the kind of a hard that reaches out and pokes you. Never again as long as I live will I try to sleep on sand. I ached and creaked. But I was so tired and so sleepy that pretty soon I fell off to sleep and dreamed dreams. I never was so busy dreaming in my life, and none of them pleasant.

It seemed as if I’d hardly shut my eyes when Catty shook me and whispered that it was my watch.

“You said I could sleep two hours,” says I.

“You have,” says he. “Two long ones.”

“I just this minute laid down,” says I, but I got up just the same, and rubbed my eyes, and felt like a boiled owl. Catty curled up in the corner, and that was the end of him.

I never thought two hours could be so long, but they can. Just sit in the dark, all alone, scairt half stiff the way I was—do it for five minutes and see. Why, five minutes is a week long, and two hours is the best part of a year. I don’t see why it takes men a couple of months to build a house. If all hours are as long as mine were then, a dub carpenter could build a hotel in fifteen minutes.

It was lucky nothing happened. I could hear somebody walking around every little while, and thought it was a guard, but that was all. I woke Catty, and took another snooze myself, and then it was morning. Morning means breakfast, and I’m partial to breakfast. When I get up I want food, and if I don’t get food, why, I’m not so awful happy.

“Catty,” says I, “got a cup of coffee in your pocket?”

“Boys shouldn’t drink coffee,” says he. “It says so in the book.”

“All right. Give me a glass of milk and about twelve flapjacks and two or three fried cakes, and I’ll call it square.”

“Well,” says he, “I don’t see why we should starve when we’re almost buried in food.”

“Raw canned peas don’t strike me very hard for breakfast food,” says I.

“No, but there must be crackers or biscuit, or something like that, and maybe canned meat. I’ve heard there’s nothing like the juice of canned tomatoes for thirst.”

“Uhhh!” says I.

“You always read about cowboys drinking it,” he says, “in wild-west stories.”

“Let’s see what we can find,” says I.

We didn’t find much that was useful. But we did make out a breakfast after a fashion. The difficulty was opening cases without making a racket, and the way we did it was to cut into them with our jackknives. It was slow, but it worked. There were some crackers like hardtack, only harder, and there was a case of cans of corned beef, and I found a big box of sweet cookies. It saved us from starving clean to death, but it didn’t help the thirst any.

“Let’s try the tomatoes,” says Catty.

“You take the first swig,” says I, “and if you live through it, I’ll come next.”

“Nope,” says he, “we’ll open two cans. I’ll count three and we both drink at once.”

So we got out a couple of cans and bored two holes in the tops, and Catty says, “One—two—three.” Neither of us made a move.

“Bad start,” he says. “Try again.”

It’s lucky few things are as bad as you think they are going to be. This wasn’t. Tomato juice wouldn’t be an awful punishment if it wasn’t for the seeds. You kind of have to drink through your teeth so as to screen the seeds out. When we got used to it we could do it pretty accurate, and the juice was wet. It was mighty refreshing, too, when we finally got it down, and right off I felt a lot better.

“Now what?” says I.

“Nothing but wait,” says he.

“We can’t get out of here by daylight.”

“Not a chance.”

“And it’ll be ten hours before dark again. I’m crazy about being cooped up here for ten hours.”

“Maybe,” says he, “something will happen to pass the time away.”

“More’n likely,” I says, “what with mutiny and all that’s going on.”

“They won’t mutiny,” says he, “until the treasure’s found. It would be foolish. But the minute anybody digs up any gold, why, off she pops.”

“It doesn’t seem right to stay here, knowing there’s going to be a mutiny, and not give this Jonas P. Dunn warning of it. I never heard of any heroes that stay around and allowed mutineers to do what they wanted. Heroes always do something smart and wonderful, and rescue all the good folks.”

“There’s something in that,” he says kind of thoughtful. “I’ll think it over.”

It wasn’t long before the digging commenced right alongside of us, and you can bet we were pretty interested. Any shovelful might uncover the treasure, and then things would pop. It was like waiting for somebody to jab a pin into you. Exciting? Sure it was, but I can do with less excitement and more peace and comfort.

Then I remembered the case of sardines we buried the night before. I just remembered it in time. One of the diggers let out a yell, and everybody gathered around and there was excitement. I never saw a mutiny start, so I don’t know exactly how it’s done, but I was ready for anything, and I was glad I could swim. My mind was all made up to take a header into the water—if I could get that far—and just swim. I’d swim any place so long as I got away from where I was. Treasure didn’t mean a thing to me. Whatever interest I had in it could have been bought for a rusty horseshoe nail.

There was excitement for a minute and shouting and everybody came running. But then a man busted open the case with his pick, and it wasn’t anything but sardines. We were peeking out from under the tarpaulin, and you never saw anything sag like that gang of men did. The mutiny was ripe to pick, I guess, but it just laid down and groaned. You never saw any crowd so disgusted in your life. Even Mr. Dunn came running over, but when he saw what had been dug up he was the maddest man in the country, and he acted it.

“If I find out the joker who buried that thing,” he says, as vicious as a yellow dog, “I’ll fix him so he won’t joke again for a day or two.”

The men just looked at him and scowled. He walked off and the digging commenced again, but somehow there didn’t seem to be such a lot of enthusiasm about it. We could see one man who kept circulating among the others, and right off we guessed he was the fellow who had got up the mutiny, and that he was patching it together so it would run again when he needed it. He was a big man, and there was something about his face that I didn’t like a bit. He looked like the kind of man who would be careless with other folks’ health.

So things quieted down again and the digging went on and waiting went on.

“I wonder,” says I, “what they think on board the Albatross. I’ll bet Naboth and Rameses III are boiling over. They’ll think we’re drowned or something.”

“Can’t be helped,” says Catty. “When there’s an adventure like this going on, somebody’s got to worry. They always do. It might as well be Naboth.”

“What,” says I, “if they come to this pile for grub—and what if they notice how we’ve piled up boxes.”

“They won’t,” says Catty, but he said it more like he hoped so than as if he thought so.

It wasn’t more than ten minutes later when a mate or somebody came along with a gang of men, three or four, and stopped.

“This pile of chuck,” says he, “has got to be moved. They’ll be digging here before the day’s over. You men get to shifting it over to the northeast corner there. Clean it up, and then spread the tarpaulin over it again.... On the job, now.”

Nice, wasn’t it? And there we were roosting right in the middle. I know how it feels to be inside of a banana and have somebody strip the peeling off. It isn’t a comfortable sensation. They would go ahead and just move the walls from around us, and there we’d be left as big as life and twice as natural. And then somebody might get curious to know what we were doing there. Somebody was almost sure to get curious about it.

“Catty,” says I, “the mutineers will guess we’ve been here all night, and that boss mutineer will know we overheard his plotting—and then what?”

“Then,” says Catty, “it will be up to us to do something pretty slick to escape. The heroes always escape somehow.”

“I wish,” says I, “you’d be real quick and think up how these heroes are going to escape. I’ve a feeling in my bones that it’ll take a slicker scheme than usual.”

“If we only had some hollow pipes about two feet long,” says Catty.

“Then what?”

“Why, we’d just dig ourselves in, and let the pipes run up through the sand to the air, and we’d lie there as comfortable as bugs in a rug and breathe.”

“I don’t s’pose,” says I, “anybody would stop to wonder what those pipes were sticking up for. Oh, no.”

“Anyhow,” says he, “we haven’t got them. And besides they’re going to start digging this way, and so they’d dig us out anyway. It wasn’t a very good scheme.”

“I wasn’t crazy about it when you mentioned it,” says I.

“Well,” says he, “you think of something now.”

“Me?” says I. “All I can think of is having a balloon come along and drop us a rope. But I haven’t seen a balloon around here anywheres.”

“There’s some way out of it,” he says. “There’s always a way out of everything. It just takes brains to get out of any kind of a fix.”

“There’s canned peas and tomatoes and corned beef, but I haven’t run onto a crate of brains in this pile,” says I.

“So far as I can see,” he says, “you never ran onto many brains anywhere.”

“There,” says I, “goes the first box. About seven minutes and we’re going to be answering questions there isn’t any healthy answer to.”

No gang of men ever moved boxes as fast as that crew did. And then one of them stripped the tarpaulin off the top of the heap and let in the sunlight on us. We crouched close to the wall of boxes and put off being discovered as long as we could. The number of cases between us and trouble was getting mighty small.

“No scheme yet?” says I.

“Nary scheme,” says he, “but it’ll come. It’s got to come.”

“Just get the first end of it and give me a hold of it,” says I. “The way I feel I could pull a scheme right out of anybody tail first. That’s how bad I need one.”

Then a man took a box off the top of the inner row, and another one took another box and another took another box.

“You’ve got about six seconds now,” says I.

“One second will be enough—if I get it,” says he.

“I wonder how it’ll feel?” says I.

“What?”

“Why,” says I, “whatever it is that’s going to happen to us.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and then his eyes got bright all of a sudden and he reached over and poked me.

“I’ve got it,” says he.

“It’s time,” says I, and then a man’s arm reached over and took a box from right in front of us.