VI 
HIDDEN TREASURE 
Ir cost me an appendix to become a treasure- 
hunter, but it was worth the price. I really had very 
little use for that appendix anyway, while my mem- 
bership in the Order of Treasure-Hunters has brought 
me in several million dollars’ worth of health and 
happiness. 
It all began when I was sent from a city hospital 
to an old farmhouse in the northwestern corner of 
Connecticut, with instructions to avoid all but the 
most ladylike kind of exercise. Accordingly one 
morning I found myself tottering feebly along a 
wood-road that led over Pond Hill, highly resolved 
to walk to Hen’s Pine and back. This was the lone 
tree which stood on the crest of the wooded hill 
which, half a century ago, old Hen, a freed slave, 
had begged from the charcoal-burners when they 
coaled that region. Hen’s old horse, Bill, is buried 
at its foot, and Hen had hoped to lie there himself 
with his axe, his fiddle, and his whip. Instead, he 
sleeps in a little graveyard on a bare hill beside his 
old master. 
My path had just crossed a round green circle in 
the woods where an old charcoal-pit had set its seal 
forever. Suddenly a brown bird flew up from beside 
the road a few yards ahead of me. If she had kept 
