Meg and Bobby thought this was a splendid plan, and, only stopping to kiss Mother Blossom and to take an old rusty shovel which was Bobby’s chief treasure, they ran off.  Dot and Twaddles were down at the wharf waiting to see Captain Jenks and his motor-boat, a daily habit which was encouraged by the captain, who usually brought them some little treat.

“We’ll go around the other side of the island, and they won’t see us,” said Meg, the general.  “It isn’t much longer, really.”

The other side of the island was rockier, though, and the bushes were thicker.  Still, Meg and Bobby managed to scramble though, and half an hour’s steady tramping brought them to the Harley shack.

“It keeps falling apart,” mourned Meg; and indeed the place looked worse every time they visited it.

“Apples!” shouted Bobby, running forward to look under the gnarled trees.  “Apples, Meg!  Big ones!”

“They’re not ripe,” said Meg promptly. “’Sides, they’re not ours—­ they belong to Mr. Harley.  Daddy says everything here belongs to him.”

“I guess they are green,” admitted Bobby, who had tried in vain to soften one in his fingers.  “But apples belong to anybody, Meg.”

“They do not!” contradicted Meg.  “Why, Bobby Blossom! how can you talk like that?  Don’t you remember when you and Twaddles were in the fruit store with Daddy last Spring and Twaddles took a strawberry from one of the boxes because he saw another boy do it?  You know Daddy made him put it back before he could eat it.  If strawberries don’t belong to anybody, I guess apples don’t.”

Meg’s honest blue eyes looked beseechingly at her brother.

“All right,” surrendered Bobby.  “I wasn’t going to eat ’em, anyway.”

“I hope not,” said Meg severely.  “What’ll we play?”

“Hunting for treasure,” responded Bobby.  “That’s why I brought the shovel.  You want to pound first?”

Meg and Bobby had invented this game.  They pretended that hundreds of years ago fierce pirates had buried chests of gold and jewels on this end of the island and that the Harley shack had been the castle home of these wicked sea rovers.  The pirates had died without leaving directions to tell where they had buried the treasure, and gradually the castle had crumbled away.

Then, one day, there came two brave sailors (some people called them Meg and Bobby) and they set to work to dig up the great iron chests.  They meant to divide the money and jewels with the descendants of those from whom the pirates had stolen it.  And their method of locating the buried treasure was to go about with a shovel and tap here and there.  Where the earth gave out a hollow sound, there they would dig.  These two sailors had not yet found anything, but it was certainly an exciting game.

“Dig here, Bobby!” cried Meg, when she had rapped the earth around the crazy chimney and persuaded herself that it sounded “hollow.”