CHAPTER III

“TREASURE-TROVE.”

TAKING a circuitous route, in order that, if he was seen emerging from the woods, it might be at a distance from the spot where his treasure was concealed, Jack came out upon the pasture, crossed it, took the lane, and soon got over the bars into the barn-yard. As he entered from one side he met Mr. Pipkin coming in from the other.

“Hullo!” he cried, with a wonderfully natural and careless air, “did ye get wet?”

“Yes, wet as a drownded rat, I did! So did Phin,—and good enough for him, by hokey!” said Mr. Pipkin. “Where’ve you been?”

“O, I went into the woods. Got wet, though, a little; and dirty enough,—just look at my clothes!”

“I’ve changed mine,” remarked Mr. Pipkin. “Wasn’t a rag on me but what was soakin’ wet. I wished I had gone to the woods.”

“I’m glad ye didn’t,” thought Jack, as he walked on. “O,” said he, turning back as if he had just thought of something to tell, “see what I found!”

“Half a dollar? ye don’t say! Found it? Where, I want to know!” said Mr. Pipkin, rubbing the piece, first on his trousers, then on his boot.

“Over in the woods there,—picked it up on the ground,” said Jack, who discreetly omitted to mention the fact that it had first been laid on the ground by Lion.

“That’s curi’s!” remarked Mr. Pipkin.

“What is it?” said Phin, making his appearance, also in dry garments. He looked at the coin, while Jack repeated the story he had just told Mr. Pipkin; then said, with a sarcastic smile, “Feel mighty smart, don’t ye, with yer old half-dollar! I don’t believe it’s a good one.” And Master Chatford sounded it on a grindstone under the shed. “Couldn’t ye find any more where ye found this?”

“What should I want of any more, if this isn’t a good one?” replied Jack. “Here! give it back to me!”

“’Tain’t yours,” said Phin, with a laugh, pocketing the piece, and making off with it.

“It’s mine, if I don’t find the owner. ’Tisn’t yours, any way! Phin Chatford!”—Phin started to run, giggling as if it was all a good joke, while Jack started in pursuit, very much in earnest. “Give me my money, or I’ll choke it out of ye!” he cried, jumping upon the fugitive’s back, midway between barn and house.

“Here, here! Boys! boys!” said a reproving voice; and Phin’s father, coming out of the wood-shed, approached the scene of the scuffle. “What’s the trouble, Phineas? What is it, Jack?”

“He’s choking me!” squealed Phineas.

“He’s got my half-dollar!” exclaimed Jack, without loosing his hold of Phin’s neck.

“Come, come!” said Mr. Chatford. “No quarrelling. Have you got his half-dollar?”

“Only in fun. Besides, ’tain’t his”; and Phin squalled again.

“Let go of him, Jack!” said Mr. Chatford, sternly. Jack obeyed reluctantly. “Now what is it all about?”

“I’ll tell ye, deacon!” said round-shouldered Mr. Pipkin, coming forward. “It’s an old half-dollar Jack found in the woods; Phin snatched it and run off with ’t. Jack was arter him to git it back; he lit on him like a hawk on a June-bug; but he ha’n’t begun to give him the chokin’ he desarves!”

“Give me the money!” said the deacon. “No more fooling, Phineas!”

“Here’s the rusty old thing! ’Tain’t worth making a fuss about, any way,” said Phin, contemptuously. “Ho! Jack! you don’t know how to take a joke!”

“You _do_ know how to take what don’t belong to you,” replied Jack. “Is it a good one, Mr. Chatford? That’s what I want to know.”

“Yes, I guess so,—I don’ know,—looks a little suspicious. Can’t tell about that, though; any silver money will tarnish, exposed to the damp. I’ll ring it. Sounds a little mite peculiar. Who’s got a half-dollar?”

“I have!” cried Phin’s little sister Kate.

In a minute her piece was brought, and Jack’s was sounded beside it on the door-stone; Jack listening with an anxious and excited look.

“No, it don’t ring like the other,” observed the deacon. Jack’s heart sank. “Has a more leaden sound.” His heart went down into his shoes. “It may be good, though, after all.” It began to rise again. “We can’t tell how much the rust has to do with it. Shouldn’t wonder if any half-dollar would ring a little dull, after it had been lying out in the woods as long as this has.” And Jack’s spirits mounted again hopefully. “I’m going over to the Basin to-night,” concluded the deacon. “I’ll take it to the watch-maker, and have him test it, if you say so.”

“I wish you would,” said Jack. “And—I’d like to know who it belongs to.”

“That’s right; of course you don’t want it if it’s a bad one, or if you can find the real owner to it.”

“I meant,” faltered Jack,—“of course I wouldn’t think of passing counterfeit money, and I don’t want another man’s money any how,—but—I found it on somebody’s land. Now I’d like to know if—that somebody—has any claim to it, on that account.”

“I don’t think he’d be apt to set up a claim, without he was a pretty mean man,” said the deacon.

“Not even if ’twas Squire Peternot?” said Mr. Pipkin. “Guess he’d put in for his share, if there was any chance o’ gittin’ on ’t!”

“Nonsense, Pippy! If ’twas a large sum, he might, but a trifle like this,—you’re unjust to the squire, Pippy.”

“I haven’t said it was the squire’s land. But suppose it _was_? And suppose it had been a large sum,” queried Jack, “could he claim it? What’s the law?” And, to explain away his extraordinary interest in the legal point, he added, laughingly, “Just for the fun of it, I’d like to know what he _could_ do if he _should_ try Phin’s joke, and set out to get my half-dollar away!”

“I really don’t know about the law,” the deacon was saying, when Lion barked. “Hist! here comes Peternot himself! Say nothing. I’ll ask him. He’s bringing his nephew over to see us.”

“He’s kind of adopted his nephew, hain’t he, sence he heard of his son’s death?” said Mr. Pipkin. “I’ve seen him hangin’ around there.”

“No; he only wants to get him into our school next winter.”

“Ho! a schoolmaster!” whispered Phin, jeering at the new-comer. “Say, Jack! I bet we can lick him!”

“Don’t look as if he had any more backbone ’n a spring chicken,” was Mr. Pipkin’s unfavorable criticism, as the gaunt and limping squire came to the door with his young relative.

“Good afternoon, neighbor,” said the deacon, shaking hands first with the uncle, then with the nephew. “You’ve come just at the right time. We’ve a legal question to settle. Suppose Jack, here, finds a purse of money on my place; no owner turns up; now whose purse is it, Jack’s or mine?”

“Your land—your hired boy—I should say, your purse,” said the squire, emphatically.

“But suppose _you_ find such a purse on my land?”

“H’m! that alters the case. How is it, Byron? My nephew is studying law; he can tell you better than I can about it.”

Peternot thought this a good chance to bring the candidate for the winter’s school into favorable notice; and the candidate for the winter’s school made the most of his opportunity. He was a slender young man with a sallow complexion, a greenish eye, a pimpled forehead, and a rather awkward and studied manner of speaking. In rendering his opinion he was as prolix as any judge on the bench. He began with a disquisition on the nature of law, and finally, coming down to the case in point, said it would be considered a case of treasure-trove.

“What’s that?” Jack eagerly interrupted him.

“Treasure-trove is treasure found.”

“Then why don’t they say treasure found?”

“’Sh, boy!” said Mr. Chatford, good-naturedly, smiling at the youngster’s impatience of long-winded sentences and large words. “What’s the law of—treasure-trove, I believe you call it, Mr. Dinks?”

“I don’t think there’s any law on the subject,” replied the student of Blackstone, picking his teeth with a straw.

“No law! then how can such a case be decided?”

“Custom, which makes a sort of unwritten law, would here come in.”

“Well, what’s the custom?”

Thereupon Mr. Byron Dinks became prolix again, speaking of English custom, which, like English law, creates precedents for our own country. The meaning of his discourse, stripped of its technical phrases and tedious repetitions, seemed to be, that formerly, treasure-trove went to the crown; that in more modern times it was divided—in a case like this—between the finder and the man on whose premises it was found; but that he didn’t think any precedent had been established in America.

“We’re about as wise now as we were before,” remarked Phin’s elder brother Moses, standing in the kitchen door.

Mr. Chatford gave him a wink to remain silent, and said, “How are we to understand you, Mr. Dinks? To use your own expression, A finds money on B’s premises; now what would be your advice to B?”

“Supposing B is my client? I should advise him to get possession of the money, if he could. Possession is nine points of the law.”

“Well, but if he couldn’t get possession?”

“Then try to compromise for one half. Then for a quarter. Then for what he could get.”

“Very good. Now what would be your advice to A?”

“A is my client?”

“Yes, we’ll suppose so.”

Spitting and throwing away his straw, Mr. Byron Dinks said with a laugh, “My advice to A would be to pocket the money and say nothing about it; keep possession, any way; fight for it.”

“Thank you,” said the deacon, with quiet irony in his tones. “Now we know what the law is on this subject, boys.”

“I don’t see, for my part, that it differs very much from common sense,” remarked the simple-minded Mr. Pipkin, “only it takes more words to git at it.”

“I’m sure,” said the squire, “my nephew has given you all the law there is to govern such cases, and good advice to his clients. ’T ain’t his fault if people can’t understand him.”

“I guess we all understand the main point, now we’ve got at it,” said Deacon Chatford. “Hang on to your money, Jack.”

“You’ve got it,” said Jack, more deeply glad and agitated than any one suspected.

“So I have. Well, I’ll tell ye when I get home from the Basin to-night whether it’s good or not. Walk in, gentlemen.”

And the deacon entered the house with his guests.