“My word! it’s stamped with a sunburst on one side, on the other with a ship.”
“Yes, and with a burning mountain an’ a horn thrown in!” Kenjo’s tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth with excitement as he replied to the shrieked comment from Miles.
“A sunburst and a ship!” Jessica clasped her hands wildly; she too began to foot it upon the sandy hillside, to dance, not lightly as a foam-chicken, but heavily as a very wet and draggled one on the skirts of the still dripping vegetation. “Oh, wasn’t it queer that I should be the one to find it, for our Camp Fire Girls’ symbol is the Sun—and I have always loved ships?” She did not mention the source of her affection for sailing ships in the glamor that surrounded the figure of her great-grandparent, as she looked eagerly, greedily at the large silver coin lying on Stack’s brown palm, winking up at a fellow-sunburst in the sky where fair weather was beginning to reassert itself.
A large, antique silver coin of a size and stamp such as neither Boy Scout nor Camp Fire Girl had ever seen before.
But the Eagle Scout showed no inclination to hand over to her the coin. He only began to gesticulate and explain the situation to Toiney whose tassel had, forthwith, a bobbing spasm.
“Houp-e-la! Ciel! he fin’ de dolla’—de silvare dolla’—l’argent blanc.” Now it was Toiney’s turn to waltz on the hillside, with his tassel. “He fin’ l’argent blanc! Ain’ he de smarty?” looking excitedly at Stack. “Ciel! I’ll go forre dig, too, me. Oh!
“Rond! Rond! Rond!
Petit pie pon ton!”
With this wild roundelay, which had no sane meaning whatever, upon his lip, Toiney turned his clay pipe which had about an inch and a half of stem—his petit boucane, as he called it—upside down between his lips and fell to clawing at the sands with his swarthy hands as if he would root the very heart out of this rich sand-hill.
That was the digging signal for the other three!
The Camp Fire Girl forgot that she was wet through and that others must be anxious about her. Stack forgot that he had ever roosted on one leg in quicksands. Kenjo forgot that he was Kenjo and possessed a red head. One and all they clawed with their fingers, dug and scraped with heels and toes, until the sodden sand-hill looked as if a regiment of roosters, each with an attendant flock of hens, had pecked and wallowed there for a week.
“There must—must be more where this coin came from!” Such was their battle-cry; now and again one or other of them sounded it.
Now and again, too, each one had a lucid interval of demanding to see the sunburst coin anew, to examine afresh its stamp and half-obliterated inscription.
Miles—otherwise Stack—would then take it from his vest pocket and turn it over on his palm; he did not want it to go out of his keeping, which Jessica privately thought was very mean of him, as she claimed the distinction of seeing it first and had paid dearly for that initial glimpse, too.
“And I persuaded myself it was only a piece of glass or a bright shell!” she exclaimed from time to time, having the feminine trick of reverting to mistakes. “Can you make out the date on it?” she demanded very practically after one such reversion.
“No, I can’t!” Stack examined the coin more critically than he had yet taken the time to do in his frantic eagerness to find more. “The last figures look like a 3 and an 8. But it might be 1638 or 1838—date’s partly worn off. Houp-la! wasn’t it somewhere about 1638 that Captain Kidd was flourishing? My history’s hazy. Gee—if we’re on the track of some of his buried treasure when other people have been digging for ages and consulting all sorts of fake fortune-tellers and never even got upon the trail of a hoard!”
“We consulted the Indian top.” Kenjo’s voice had a thrill of semi-superstition.
“Yes, but the Kullibígan couldn’t make up its mind which of us would dig up a fortune from the sands; you came in on it, so did I, so did Arline—that’s nothing!” Thus Jessica laughed him down. “Wait a minute!” She caught at Miles’s arm. “I want to see if I can make out more of the inscription before you put it—the coin—back into your pocket again. You needn’t be so afraid that some one is going to snap it out of your hand!” haughtily.
Thus shamed, Stack suspended digging for an age-long interval of a minute and held the coin on lingering exhibition, right and obverse sides.
“Oh! isn’t it a dandy sunburst, with stars above it?” So Jessica gloated over its ancient stamp. “I can partly make out the inscription over the sunburst, too: it’s Repub—then something else, and then Peruana. I can read that clearly, but not the rest.”
“Underneath the letters look like CUZCO,” spelled out Kenjo. “And—oh! don’t be stingy, Stack; let’s look at it a minute longer—and in the middle of the sunburst there are a few black dots that seem to be meant for the two eyes, the nose and mouth of a face—a queer sun-face! Oh! Ha! Ha!” Ken’s boyish laugh rang out with a fire that matched his hair.
“Now for the reverse side: the ship is on that,” pleaded Jessica hungrily.
“Yes, and the volcano and the horn—an’ something like a castle!” muttered Miles. “But we’re wasting time!” The coin vanished again into his pocket. “It’s me for digging, I tell you—digging hard! If we can find some more—a hoard of them—our fortune’s made.... I’d be glad to have my fortune made for me,” he continued, presently, out of the heart of a sand-spout; “I enter ‘Tech’ in the fall and for the next four years I’ll have to work all vacation-time in order to push myself through—help pay college expenses. Oh, goody, if this coin and others would only lend me a boost!”
“I need a ‘boost,’ as you call it, too; I’ll have to earn my own living when I graduate from high school, with no one to help me,” quavered Jessica, shivering all over in her wetness, beginning to realize that, back of frenzied excitement, she was very clammy and exhausted. “And—and I can’t earn my living in the way I’d like to do unless I get hold of some money!” She fell to scratching like a wet hen.
Stack looked at her through the sand-squall which he was raising; this was the second time that he had seen her and on both occasions her clothing looked as if she had been dragged through a river, but he decided that if she were ever dry she’d be pretty, and if, after he entered Tech, he was duly elected to his chosen fraternity, she should be his guest during Frat week when the freshmen entertained their friends.
Here he came out of fairy-land, fortune-land, for a moment, to hear the distant, strong chug, chug of a motor-boat upon the river above the Neck.
“If I get rich out of this, I’m going to have a motorcycle,” burst forth Kenjo, that distant chug shaping his dream.
“Rond! Rond! Rond!”
chanted Toiney; he did not open his heart like the young people, but as he incessantly clawed and dug, he had dreams, pathetic in their grandeur, about swaggering back to a rural spot near Quebec, where his old mother still clattered round in wooden shoes, as one who had made “beeg fortune on United State’.”
Never before were such silvery air-castles constructed out of so little metal as that contained in one tarnished coin—a coin of a goodly size, however, larger than a fifty-cent piece, almost as big as an American dollar.
Suddenly through the glittering halls of those castles in the air resounded an earthly shout that, momentarily, shattered them; it was accompanied by a swish of oars; the chug, chug of the power-boat had ceased.
“Ahoy there! For heaven’s sake! have you all turned into a passel of hens?” It was Captain Andy’s amazed shout as he landed from his rowboat on a point of the sands which experience had taught him to be safe. “I’m after one hen, to take her back with me!” pointing to the scratching Jessica. “A nice scare she’s given us all—I found the dory bobbing up the river. An’ by gracious! my heart’s been in my mouth since. What in thunder are you diggin’ like that for? Mad as March hares, all of you!”
“Humph! Perhaps we’re not so crazy as you think. Look at that!” With a lordly air Stack drew out the coin and held it forth in its silver beauty, stained and worn by long burial, for the captain to see, as he drew near. “What d’you think of our madness now?” He gulped and gasped.
“Why! Why! It’s one of those old sun-dollars!” Captain Andy, receiving it upon his own palm and turning it over (Stack was not afraid to trust it to him), looked pleased, highly pleased, and interested, but not wildly carried away as befitted one who held the first-fruit of a fortune in his hand.
“One of those old Peruvian sun-dollars from the wreck that took place here between sixty an’ seventy years ago, when I was a small boy!” he exclaimed again. “It’s a handsome coin, all right! But if you dig till all’s blue, I’ll warrant you’ll never find another of ’em, or if you should, ’twould be only one at a time an’ far between;............