“It appears to me,” he said in his solemn way, “that it is not right to let Wampus pay for repairing that boat. The boat was being used by the Land Pirate Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and the Company ought to pay for the repairs.” “Sure!” I said, laughing. “And how much money has the Company got to pay with?” We counted up, and we had three dollars and sixty-seven cents. The part of it I had was the seven cents. “I didn’t mean exactly that,” Jibby said. “I meant that the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company ought to earn the money to pay for repairing the boat.” “By finding treasure?” I asked, as sarcastic as anything. “Why, no,” Jibby said, without a smile. “I did not mean that. I was thinking the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company might mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and get the money that way.” You couldn’t beat Jibby Jones when it came to thinking of things. CHAPTER XII THE WORM MINE The next morning we all went down to the shaft-house, which was the old shack near Mosquito Hollow, and set to work in the worm mine. Jibby’s idea was that we should mine some first-class worms and then set a trot-line in the river and bait it with the worms, and twice a day we would “run” the trot-line and get the fish. Then we would sell the fish to our folks and to the other families on our island. And, every day when we were not running the trot-line, we would be catching fish with poles, and we would sell those fish, too. And before the summer was over, we would, maybe, have enough money to have Wampus’s motor-boat mended. Well, I don’t know how that would have worked out, because we did not raise the money that way. We got it by solving the mystery of the stolen cider that we had heard the Rat talking to the Tough Customer about. But the credit belongs to Jibby Jones--I guess you will see that. It was Skippy Root’s father that offered the reward, because the barrels were his barrels. They had been stolen from his wholesale grocery house down in Riverbank. The reward was twenty-five dollars, and there was something funny about the whole business, and my father and Mr. Root and Mr. Smale, and Tad’s father and Mr. Jones knew the joke and laughed about it a lot up on Birch Island where we were spending the summer, but they did not tell us or anybody. The notice in the paper only said, “$25 Reward for information leading to the recovery of five barrels stolen from the Root Wholesale Grocery,” or something like that. But I’ll tell you what the joke was. We found out later on. One of the things Mr. Root sold in his wholesale grocery was cider--sweet cider--and he sold it by the barrel, but he had five barrels of sweet cider that turned hard while it was in his grocery cellar, and it was against the law to sell hard cider or to have it around, so he thought he had better get rid of it. He didn’t want to go to jail. Nobody does, I guess.