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“You and me will divide on that,” he says.

“Sure,” I says, “but that can stand over till afterwards, Tom.”

“Stand over, nothing!” he says, very sharp; and with that we both set off running for my house.

It was a jumpy thing to enter that darkened room, with the feeling you couldn’t shake off that Old Dibs was peering in at us, and that every minute we’d hear his footstep, everything laid out just as he had last touched them, and almost warm, even to his slippers and his collar and the old hat against the wall. But it made no more difference to Tom than if it had been his own hat, and he tramped in like a policeman, saying, “Where is it, Bill?”

“In one of them two camphor-wood chests,” says I.

He lifted up one of them by the end and let it fall ker-bang!

“Not here,” says he.

“Try the other,” says I, with a sudden sinking.

He let that crash, too, and turning around, looked me in the face.

“Good God, Tom!” said I.

“Just what I suspected all along,” said Tom, as savage as a tiger. “He’s made way with it!”

We didn’t stop to speak another word, but rummaged the whole room upside down.

“He’s buried it,” says Tom, savager than ever, “and what kind of a bastard was you to let him?”

“It was none of my business,” says I.

“None of your business!” he repeated, screaming out at me like a woman–“to have a quarter of a million by the tail and let it go? You might have been slack about your own half, but it was a swine’s trick not to keep track of mine!”

“He can’t have taken it very far,” I said.

“Not far!” yelled Tom, making an insult of every word I said. “Why, what was to prevent him lugging away a little this day and that, till the whole caboodle was sunk in a solid block? What do you suppose he was doing with the lantern, you tom-fool? Planting it, of course–planting every dollar of it, night after night, while you were snoozing in your silly bed.”

“If it’s anywhere it’s in the Kanaka graveyard,” says I. “I’ll go bail it’s within ten feet of where we found his dead body.”

“Did you stake the place?” says Tom.

I was ashamed to tell him I hadn’t even thought of the money, being struck all of a heap, and always powerful fond of Old Dibs.

“It would serve you right if I made you dig up the whole graveyard, single-handed,” said Tom; “and if you had a spark of proper feeling, Bill Hargus, you’d fall on your knees and beg my parding for having acted like such a damned ninny!”

I would have answered him back in his own coin if I hadn’t felt so bad about it all, and rattled, besides. I had punched Tom’s head often and often, and he had punched mine; but I was staggered by the money being missing, and the loss of it just seemed to swallow up everything else. Somehow, it had never seemed my money till then, and the more I felt it mine the more galling it was to give it up. Tom relented when he saw how cut up I was, withdrawing all the hard things he had said, and going on the other tack to cheer me up. He said he was just as big an ass as I was, and came out handsome about its being both our fault, and how it didn’t matter a hill of beans anyway, for we’d soon get our spades on to it. It 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.