“Do you know,” said he, “now that it’s all over, I don’t want that money at all; I mean I wouldn’t care so much about it even if it didn’t belong to anybody. It was the fun of wanting to find it, and of getting it. Adventure is better than money, when it comes to a showdown. Because it’s a blamed sight more scarce, I suppose.” “Money does not always bring happiness, Tom,” said Brent, with a whimsical look on his funny face. “There you go, joking again,” said Tom. “What are we going to do with the box when we go fishing?” Brent said. “It would be a shame to take the money out of the box, it wouldn’t look like treasure any more, it would just look like plain, common, everyday money.” “Plain, common, everyday money is right,” said Tom. “What do you say we have a game of checkers? Somehow, I’ve turned against pinochle since to-night.” “I always said there was no romance to pinochle, Tommy,” said Brent. “Checkers is full of medieval tradition. I think the pirates used to play checkers--or was it Mah-Jong? Anyway, it wasn’t pinochle. All right, I’ll beat you a game before we turn in. There goes the night worker.” “I kind of like to hear that owl screeching,” said Tom. ----- [1] By “the Philistine” he meant my humble self. CHAPTER XXXII—A New Foe I have told you of the geography of Rattlesnake Gulch; I must now tell you something of its immediate neighborhood. I never knew and I do not know now, whether the name Rattlesnake Gulch pertains to the little wild hollow where the cabin stood or to the larger gap of land in which it lay. It was, as one might say, a gulch within a gulch. Only the larger gulch is not so easy to present to the mind’s eye. I find myself writing of these places in the past tense, for they seem to me now all as part of a tale that is told. You must, somehow, be made to see this wild section clearly, if you are to understand what happened there. If some wide railroad cut were overgrown and cluttered with rock and crazy trees and tangled brush for a couple of hundred feet or so, that would be something like the immediate neighborhood of old Buck’s cabin. Through this miniature jungle a stream had once flowed, and the old stream bed was a very chaos of rock and tangled undergrowth; a chaotic gully. On its damp bottom, underneath the rank growth, no ray of sunlight ever penetrated. A strange kind of life thrived here, slugs and little red lizards which hid under stones and scooted when such a refuge was removed by some alien hand or foot from the world above. So much you already know.