VIII

Early the next morning Mr. Webb slipped out to get a breath of fresh air before breakfast. It was a bright clear morning. He took a long drink of fresh cold water from a raindrop, and then strolled along over the pine needles, humming to himself.

Oh, the winding road is long, is long,

But never too long for me.…

Pretty soon he met an ant.

“Good-morning,” he said politely. “I am a stranger in these parts. I wonder if you can tell me if there is any good fly-catching in the vicinity?”

Now, almost always, if you speak to an ant, no matter how pleasantly, it will walk right by without answering. Ants do this because they are always busy, and they think conversation is a waste of time. But Mr. Webb was a fine-looking spider, and the ant was rather flattered at being spoken to by him. So she said:

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. But there aren’t many spiders in our neighbourhood, so I should think not.”

“Ah, that’s a pity,” said Mr. Webb. “But it seems a very pleasant neighbourhood.”

“We like it,” said the ant. “Although it’s not as pleasant as it used to be before the robber ants came. They live in an old stump down in the woods, and they are all the time stealing our children and robbing our storehouses.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Webb. “That is very trying.”

“Indeed you may say so!” she replied. “It’s hard enough to bring up a family of fifty children these days without having robbers about. We had to leave our old house and build a new one, deeper under the ground, so it wouldn’t be so easy for them to break into it. Perhaps you’d like to see it?”

“I should be charmed,” said the spider; and so she led him to where there was a little hole in the ground, out of which ants were carrying bits of dirt and sand, which they dropped outside before hurrying back for more. She led him down the hole and into a long tunnel. Part of the tunnel was so narrow that Mr. Webb had trouble squeezing through, but at last they came out in a large room which was really the ants’ dining-room. Here there were dozen of ants running to and fro, popping in and out of doorways; some of them bringing food which they fed to the ant children, and others carrying out dirt from the tunnels and corridors they were building. They were all much too busy to pay any attention to their visitor, and they merely nodded and said: “How do,” and went on with their work.

“It is a very pleasant house,” said Mr. Webb, when he had been shown through all the many rooms and passages.

“Ah, you should see our other house!” said the ant with a sigh. “Gold floors in the reception hall and the dining-room, and a gold ceiling in the nursery! There wasn’t a finer one in the woods.”

Mr. Webb pricked up his ears. “I should think not!” he said. “Gold floors, eh? Now, may I ask how that happened?”

“Nobody knows,” said the ant. “When my grandmother first moved into the house, some of them were there, and then later, when we enlarged the house and dug out more rooms, we found more of them.”

“I should like to see that,” said Mr. Webb.

“If I weren’t so busy this morning, I would take you over and show them to you,” said the ant.

“I am afraid I am keeping you from your work,” said Mr. Webb; “so I’ll just run along. But if you will show me where your old house is, I’ll run in and look at it on my way back to join my friends.”

So the ant went up to the door with him and showed him just which way to go, and then he thanked her politely for her hospitality and said good-bye.

Without much trouble he found the house that the ants had moved out of, and he crawled down the tunnel into the empty rooms that had once been a happy home, but were now empty and deserted. Soon he stood in the dining-room. It wasn’t very large. Even Mr. Webb, who was a very small spider, could walk across it in five or six steps. But sure enough the floor was of bright, shining, yellow gold. And there were raised letters on it, and the figure of an eagle.

Now before he was married to Mrs. Webb, Mr. Webb had travelled round a good deal. And once he had lived in a bank. So he knew what a twenty-dollar gold piece looks like. And now he knew that the floor of this ants’ dining-room was a twenty-dollar gold piece.

He did not wait to look at the other rooms, but hurried back to the log house as fast as he could go. For he remembered what the swallow had told them about the bag of gold, and he knew that he had found it.

This was what had happened. The ants who had first built that house had happened to begin digging just where the bag of gold was buried. It had been buried a long, long time, and the cloth had rotted away. The ants had tunnelled in and around the gold coins, and wherever one lay flat, they had made it the floor or ceiling of a room.

Mr. Webb got back just as the animals were ready to start. They gathered round him with their ears as close to him as they could get, so they could hear his tiny voice, and he told his story, and then they all rushed out to the ant house, and the two dogs and Freddy, the pig, started digging. Freddy dug with his long sharp nose, but the dogs dug with their forefeet. And in no time at all they had uncovered a great shining heap of gold coins.

Then they were all very glad, and Charles, the rooster, was so excited that he crowed and crowed.

But Henrietta said: “My goodness! Stop that noise! I don’t see what you are all so happy about anyway. Now you’ve dug it up, what are you going to do with it?”

“Take it back to Mr. Bean, of course,” said Robert.

“What are you going to do about going to Florida, then?” asked Henrietta. “Are you going to lug it all the way to Florida, and then back again? And what are you going to carry it in?”

“We hadn’t thought about that,” said the animals.

“Well, you’d better think about it now,” said Henrietta. “The only thing you can do with the gold now is to bury it again, and get it when we come back from Florida. But I’m sure I don’t know how we’re ever going to take it to Mr. Bean.”

“Oh, we can carry it in baskets or something,” said Freddy. “Don’t you worry about that, hen.”

So they scraped the earth back into the hole and covered up the treasure, and then they started along.