Vee. "We've found it! Honest to goodness we have.
Come and see."

"As though I wasn't coming as fast as I could, child!" says Auntie, who
has scrambled over the bow somehow and is plowin' towards us with her
skirts gripped high on either side.

Thrillin'! Say, I don't believe any of us could tell just what we did
do for the next half hour or so. I remember once Old Hickory got
jammed into the hole and we had to pry him out. And another time, when
we was rollin' out the cask, it was Auntie who helped me pull it
through and ease it down the slope. She'd lost most of her hairpins
and her gray hair was hangin' down her back. Also, she'd stepped on
the front of her skirt and ripped off a breadth. But them trifles
didn't seem to bother her a bit.

"Ho, ho!" she warbles merry. "Gold and jewels! The jewels of old
Spain and of the days of Louis Fourteenth. Pirate gold! We've dug it!
The very thing I've always wanted to do ever since I was a little girl.
Ho, ho!"

"And I rather guess," adds Old Hickory, fishin' a broken cigar out of
his vest pocket, "that as treasure hunters we're not such thundering
jokes, after all. Eh?"

And say, when Old Hickory starts crowin' you can know he sees clear
through to daylight. I looks over my shoulder just then, and, sure
enough, it's beginnin' to pink up in the east.

"My dope is," says I, "that it's goin' to be a large, wide day.
Anyhow, it opens well."

CHAPTER XVI

TORCHY TAKES A RUNNING JUMP

Course, it don't sound natural. A merry sunrise party is an event that
ain't often listed on the cards, unless it's a continuous session from
the evenin' before. But this wasn't a case of a bunch of
night-bloomin' gladiolas who'd lasted through. Hardly. Although
Auntie does have something of a look like the parties you see lined up
at Yorkville Court, charged with havin' been rude to taxi drivers; and
Mr. Ellins might have been passin' the night on a bakery gratin' with a
sportin' extra for a blanket.

We was a long, long ways from either taxis or traffic cops, though. We
was on Nunca Secos Key, with the Gulf of Mexico murmurin' gentle behind
us, and out in front a big red sun was blazin' through the black pines
that edge the west coast of Florida. Five of us, includin' Vee and
Captain Rupert Killam and me; and each in our own peculiar way was
registerin' the Pollyanna-Mrs. Wiggs stuff.

Why not? For one thing, it's about as handsome a December mornin' as
you