t stood to reason it couldn't be far away or buried very deep, and
a little fossicking with an iron ramrod would feel it out in no time.

Well, we gave Old Dibs a good send off, Tom and me making the coffin,
and we buried him in a likely place to windward of the Kanaka graveyard.
Tom wouldn't have him _inside_, for fear the natives might chance on the
treasure themselves, and we put a neat fence around the place, with a
priming and two coats of white paint, and a natty gate to go in by with
brass hinges. The whole settlement turned out, Iosefo outdoing himself,
and the king butting in with an address, and everything shipshape and
Bristol fashion, as sailors say. We didn't have no flowers, and the
whole business was sort of home-made and amateur, but Sarah made up for
the lack of them by pegging out the grave with little poles, and
streamers which gave quite a gay look to it, and fluttered in the wind,
very pretty to see.

Then Tom and me started in our digging operations on a checkerboard
plan, very systematic, with stakes where we left off, working by night
so as not to rouse the natives' ill will. Or, I ought to have said, two
nights, for I guess we didn't cover up our tracks sufficient, and they
got on to it. We discovered this in the form of a depitation of chiefs
and elders, who give us warning it had to stop ker-plunk! They said
they wouldn't allow their graveyard torn up, and altogether acted very
ugly and insulting. Tom and I had to sing small and put in a holiday
neither of us wanted, for the Kanakas had the whip hand of us, and I
never saw them so roused. Tom at first tried to carry it off with a high
hand, informing them that he was a British subjeck, by God! and was they
meaning to interfere with a British subjeck? But I couldn't see how that
gave him any right to dig up Kanaka graveyards for money that didn't
belong to him, and so I smoothed them down and out-talked Tom, saying it
shouldn't happen again, and I was glad they had mentioned it!

We waited a few weeks for the storm to blow over, and then begun again,
this time more cautious than before by a darned sight. We thought we
were managing beautifully, till the next day, when we went out fishing
in Tom's boat and come back to find both our stations burned to the
ground, and all our stuff stacked outside the smoking ruins,
higgledy-piggledy!

This was getting it in the neck, and we saw we were beat. We ran up a
couple of little shacks and settled dow