In a little while we had every old tin can on the island filled with worms and choice crumbly black earth in which they would be well and hearty and feel comfortable and at home. Then we began filling old pails, and wash-pitchers with the handles off, and boxes, and were fussing a little about who would go on the road and travel from town to town selling worms for the Five Friends’ and taking winter orders for spring delivery. We decided that Jibby would be the best salesman because he looked serious-minded and truthful with his big nose and tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles, but we decided he would have to wear a brand-new suit of clothes and carry a cane. We decided that the Best Quality Five Friends’ worms should have a label with a black bass on it, and that the Prime Quality label should have a pickerel picture, and the Family Quality a picture of a perch or a goggle-eye. We decided all those details. Skippy wanted to have “None genuine without this signature” printed on the label, but we gave that up because there were five of us and it would crowd the label to have five signatures; and Wampus wanted to advertise in all the magazines and on the billboards and in all the street-cars, but we did not decide to do it. We decided to let that wait a while. Jibby did not talk much. He dug and picked worms and timbered the gallery and carried out dirt, but something was bothering him. We thought he would mention it when he got ready, but he didn’t, so we asked him. “Water,” he said. “I’m worrying about water. What are we going to do if the mine floods?” “If the mine floods?” Wampus said, stopping work. We all stopped work and looked at Jibby, because we all knew that a flooded mine is a dead mine and can’t be worked until pumps are rigged up and the water pumped out. And nearly every spring the whole lower end of Birch Island is flooded, and it is a rare spring when Mosquito Hollow is not. Just about as sure as spring came, our whole mine would be under water. “But that’s not what worries me,” Jibby said. “It is these streaks of sand we have run into here and there. The whole island won’t have to be flooded to flood our mine; as soon as the water in the river rises a little, it will begin to seep through that sand and flood the mine. Then our mine is gone. No more worm mining.” Well, the flood came, but not in the way we expected. Wampus was working at the end of the tunnel one day, digging out worm ore with his pick, and Tad and Skippy were carrying it to the shaft, and me and Jibby were hoisting it up in baskets and refining the worms out of it, when Wampus shouted to us that he had struck a tree-trunk. He shouted back through the tunnel to us that it was right across the tunnel and that he would have to have an axe to chop it away, or he would have to tunnel around it.