Chapter XLII All over but ——
Then we brought the round thick logs which had formed the trunk, and which had been sawn into lengths of about four feet, and piled them one on top of another in their own order, which was obvious and unmistakable on account of the lessening girth of the trunk as it went higher. We piled three of these, fitting them one upon the other as they had stood in life, and the nail was in the fourth, with which we crowned the edifice, Jack standing upon a step-ladder and I handing up the logs.
“There!” he said, when he had built up the edifice to the height of some fifteen feet; “there’s our tree as it stood in life, wobbly, no doubt, and insecure; but it will bear the picture though it wouldn’t stand much of north-easter. Hand up the work of art.”
We hung up the portrait, and again I lay on the ground here and there and ogled the hideous thing until I had wooed its eyes to meet my own.
Then we dug together. Jack had thrown all ridiculous fastidiousness to the winds of heaven, and helped me like a man and a sensible being.
Together we dug, and the hole rapidly grew, and with it grew also our own excitement and Ginger’s, who looked on whining, as before, for the game that we were to start from our burrow for him to run away from. We had had no lunch, and the afternoon was fleeting fast; but we dug on.
Now the grave was two feet deep, and now four, now five. I had never felt so excited as this, even at that supreme moment when my fingers touched the tin box in the African veldt.
Now the hole was six feet in depth, and Jack’s head, when he stood up, was just below the earth-level. Ginger, in his excitement, pulled Jack’s cap off and laid it on the ground beside him, probably determined that if we were to disappear altogether, he would preserve at least a memento of us to swear by.
Six feet and a half, and now my spade (it was mine; I am glad it was mine), my spade struck against something hard and metallic.
“Hullo!” cried Jack, who heard the sound.
“Only a stone, I’m afraid!” said I, trembling so that I could hardly raise my spade. Jack stopped work to watch.
“Your first blood!” he said. “Dig again and see; if there are honours, they shall be yours!”
There were honours. Half impotent with excitement, I dug again.
It was no stone. Trembling, I cleared the clayey soil from the object, whatever it might be, and revealed a vessel of hardware.
“Pull it out, pull it out, man!” said Jack; “don’t stand quaking there!”
I made an effort, and removed the thing and handed it to Jack; I felt cold and faint with the excitement. I could only just see out of my eyes sufficiently to recognise that the object I had found was a large earthen jar, corked and sealed round.
Jack scrambled out of the hole and gave me a hand; I climbed out in a dream.
“Open it,” he said.
“No—you,” I gasped. I sat down and watched, only half alive.
Jack put the vessel on the ground and broke it neatly in two pieces. Inside was a small tin box, hardly larger than the envelope which Jack drew forth from it after prising it open.
“Another sickening disappointment?” I gasped.
“I don’t know,” said Jack; “read it, and see.”
“I can’t,” I said; “open it and read it to me; if it’s another sell, I shall curse Clutterbuck and die.”
Jack—looking pale and thin—broke the seal of the envelope. I saw the colour rush back to his face.
“What is it, in Heaven’s name?” I said; “don’t madden me!”
“All right this time, old boy,” cried Jack, handing me the paper with flashing eyes—“a cheque to bearer.”
It was so. A cheque for ninety-seven thousand odd pounds!
I do not know what I did. Jack, who sometimes tells the truth, says that I deliberately stood on my head on the very top of the pile of earth we had dug out of the hole, and that Ginger licked my face just as I had reached the third bar of the National Anthem (performed then positively for the first time in that position!) and brought me down with a run. Personally I do not recollect the episode.
The cheque was duly paid, the bank manager gravely smiling as I handed it to him in his private room. He was, I found, partially in the secret. He asked for, and I gave him, a short account of my adventures, when he was kind enough to express the opinion that I deserved the money.