Jibby Jones by Ellis Parker Butler

Three times after that we went up to Greenland Slough, and two of the times we went up the creek, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were not at the mouth of the creek to guard it. One of the times we found them up the creek where they were doing their treasure digging, but the third time they were nowhere around, and we had a chance to see what they had been doing.

For plain ordinary everyday tramps they had done a lot of work, I will say. Nobody could have hired them, for day's wages, to do as much digging as they had done. They had dug in eleven places -- five on one bank of the creek and six on the other -- and the holes were deep enough to bury oxen in, one on top of the other and both standing. They had tried one place and then another, and anybody could see that they had been puzzled and not sure where the cross mark on the map had been. That, we guessed, was why they were so anxious to get the map. They hadn't found anything, and they didn't know what to do next.