“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jibby drawled in his slow way. “I saw, right away, that a smart land pirate like John A. Murrell would not hide his money where you and George and Tad and Skippy would look for it. A man that could imagine a band of over one thousand men all pirating together would not hide his treasure just anywhere. He would imagine a lot of things. He would imagine he might be caught and put in jail and kept there fifty years, maybe, and he would imagine some place where his treasure could be hid where he could find it in a minute, but no one else would think of looking for it.” “That sounds like good sense,” Skippy said. “Of course it does!” said Jibby Jones. “You make fun of imagination, but how did we first come to think of treasure being hid out there at that old farm?” “Why, you saw that old pine tree in the corner of the lot,” Wampus said. “Yes, and I imagined it might be one of John A. Murrell’s signal pines, such as he had planted in the corners of yards and farms all through Tennessee and Mississippi and Arkansas. I imagined that, didn’t I? There’s nothing so useful as imagination. So I stood by that old dead pine and imagined I was John A. Murrell, with a lot of stolen treasure, and that I was liable to be caught and kept in jail fifty years or more after the treasure was hidden. I knew right away that you would not find it in the house, because that would be exactly the first place any of the Murrell gang would look for it, if he wanted to cheat John A. Murrell while Murrell was in jail. Isn’t that so?” We had to admit that it was; the house was the first place we had looked, anyway. “So I imagined I was John A. Murrell, away down in Arkansas, and that I wanted a true friend to hide my money here in Iowa, so that I could find it years later, even if the true friend was dead or had moved away, and even if the house had burned down and disappeared. I imagined I was John A. Murrell, getting out of jail and coming up the Mississippi until I came to the mouth of the creek you said was Murrell’s Run. Then I remembered the green sand you said was in the bottom of Murrell’s Run near the farmhouse. So I imagined I came up the creek until I came to the green sand, and that was a sign to me to climb out of the creek and look for--what?” “The signal pine, of course,” said Skippy Root.