The tunnel was just about big enough for two boys to crawl through on hands and knees together, so Tad took our electric torch and crawled in. He and Wampus scraped more dirt away, and then came crawling out, and you bet they were excited. “It ain’t a tree-trunk at all,” Tad said. “It’s the side of a boat--an oak boat--and it is bound with iron bands, and I’ll bet I know what it is. It’s an old viking ship. It’s a great find! I’ll bet we can dig it out and sell it to a museum for a million dollars or something.” “Sure!” Wampus said. “An old viking ship would be worth that. I bet the vikings from Norway or somewhere sailed over to America hundreds of years before Columbus did, and discovered the Mississippi, and got shipwrecked on this island, or maybe the Indians killed them, and the river dumped sand and dirt on their ship and covered it up and preserved it. Who knows the name of a museum that would be likely to buy a viking ship?” “I do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I wouldn’t spend the money you expect to get for that ship yet. No! Because I never heard of viking ships sailing up the Mississippi.” “That makes it all the rarer,” Wampus said. “You go in and look at it yourself.” So Jibby took the torch and crawled in, and I crawled in after him, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus crawled after us. Jibby felt the ship and so did I. It was oak, sure enough, and rounded like a ship’s hull, but in a minute Jibby laughed. “It’s not a ship,” he said; “it’s a barrel. I guess it’s an old barrel the river floated in here and covered up. Give me the pick.” I handed him the pick, and Jibby sat back and gave the barrel a whack with one of the points of the pick, and the pick stuck fast. The point of the pick went through the oak of the barrel and stuck in the hole it made. So Jibby sort of raised up and put his weight on the pick handle and pulled, and all at once the whole side of the barrel seemed to give and the oak staves cracked and out poured--molasses! The first big gush of it went on Jibby and in his lap, and then I got my share, and we both shouted and scrambled to our hands and knees to get away from there, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus did not know what had happened, but were plenty frightened and tried to get away, and they got tangled up and jammed in the tunnel like a cork down a bottle neck, and nobody could get out. Except the molasses. The molasses poured out. In about half a minute we were in a regular river of it and all of us covered with it. “Go on out! Go on out!” I shouted, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy were pushing and pulling each other, and shouting, and then I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was funny--five of us stuck in the molasses like flies. It was the first time I ever heard of a mine being flooded with molasses. Then we all began to laugh, except Jibby Jones, and he said, as solemn as ever: “I think we will get the reward.”