nning. There must be something uncommonly
interesting under that woodpile."

VI

BURIED TREASURE

Henrietta Hen, who was one of the busiest busybodies on the farm, came
along and stood and watched old dog Spot while he dug and scratched and
howled about the woodpile.

"What on earth is the matter with you?" she asked him. "I don't make
half that fuss when I've just laid an egg and really have something to
cackle about."

"I've no time to talk with you now," Spot told Henrietta Hen. "Can't you
see that Johnnie Green and I are moving the woodpile?"

"Why are you doing that?" Henrietta inquired.

"There's something beneath it that I want," he said hurriedly.

Henrietta Hen gave a sudden start.

"I wonder if it's a weasel!" she exclaimed. And since he didn't reply,
and she had learned to be mortally afraid of weasels, she ran off
squawking, to hide high up in the haymow in the barn.

Johnnie Green hadn't carried away much more of the woodpile when old dog
Spot began to dig furiously in the dirt. And in a few seconds' time he
unearthed a big bone.

It was a choice bone. He had buried it several days before. And when he
came back from the woods and found a woodpile on top of the place where
he had hidden it, it was no wonder that he made such a howdy-do.

Johnnie Green looked much upset as he stood stock still and saw Spot
trot away with the bone in his mouth.

"So _that_ was what he was after all the time!" he cried at last. "I
hoped it was a muskrat."

His father and the hired man laughed and laughed.

"I don't see any joke," Johnnie grumbled. "Here I've piled up wood
enough in the shed to last a month. And I might have been fishing all
the time."

"Well," said his father, "whose fault is it?"

"Old Spot's, I should think!" Johnnie replied.

"I don't see how you can blame him," said Farmer Green. "Suppose you had
buried a piece of strawberry shortcake here, expecting to eat it for
your dinner. And suppose there wasn't another piece as good--or as
big--to be had anywhere. And suppose you had come back from a tramp in
the woods, hungry as--well, hungry as you were this noon. Wouldn't you
want that piece of shortcake? If you could get old Spot to move the wood
off it, wouldn't you be glad to have him do it?"

"Maybe!" Johnnie admitted. "Maybe! But Spot wasn't after a piece of
strawberry shortcake. He was after an old bone. And he fooled me."

"I should say that you fooled yourself," his father