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!
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!”