So one day Mr. Root went out onto the platform back of his grocery and he said to his truck-driver: “Joe, I’ve got five barrels of cider in the cellar that has turned hard, and I want to get rid of it. I want you to haul those five barrels down to the river to-morrow and empty that hard cider into the river and bring the barrels back. I don’t want any hard cider around here.” “All right, Mr. Root,” Joe said; “I’ll do it to-morrow.” Well, that was all right, but it happened that there were a lot of men in the alley near the platform just then, standing around and looking at a trained bear an Italian had, and one of them must have heard Mr. Root and wanted hard cider, for that night the grocery cellar was broken into and five barrels were stolen out of it. But the joke was that the thief did not get the five barrels of hard cider; he got five barrels of molasses. He made a mistake. He took the molasses and left the hard cider. So the next day Joe dumped out the cider and Mr. Root offered a reward for the molasses. But nobody came for the reward, and it looked as if all that molasses was gone forever. And the thing Mr. Root and father and all the men laughed about was how surprised the thieves would be when they broached a barrel to have a good drink of hard cider and found it was molasses. They thought the thieves would be pretty badly surprised and scared, because, instead of taking five barrels of cider that Mr. Root did not want, they would have taken five barrels of molasses he did want. They would be mighty worried thieves. But nobody found the molasses or caught the thieves and everybody forgot all about it. We worked inside the shack at first, digging deeper and deeper, and we got pretty good worms and quite a lot of them. “But say!” Wampus said, all of a sudden. “Say! Anybody can come into our mine and mine worms; we don’t really own it. We don’t know who does own this ground down here at this end of the island.” Jibby stroked his nose awhile and thought. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to find out about that. Mostly, miners can mine wherever they want to. The man that owns the land owns the surface, but, when a prospector locates a mine and sinks his shaft, he can mine anywhere he wants to, underground. I don’t know whether a worm miner has that right or not. I know it is true of mineral mines, but a worm isn’t quite a mineral; it is an animal. Anyway, I think we had better stake out a claim here, because that is what miners always do.” So we staked out a claim, stakes at the four corners, so that it took in the whole of Mosquito Hollow. It turned out to be all right, anyway, because Skippy’s father owned the shack and the hollow, but we felt better when we had our claim staked out. It was more regular and like real miners.