We found the cave back in the fifties. My friend Dana had heard about it from her uncle. It actually wasn’t even a natural cave. We lived in Mississippi and there weren’t any natural caves in our part of the state.

Dana told me a story about when her uncle was in his teens. She said he and four of his buddies decided to carve themselves a cave out of the hillside on his dad’s property. He said they dug with spades and shovels until they had an opening large enough for all five of them to crawl into it at one time. Every chance they had, they went back and worked on it some more. Finally, it was as big as a small room and high enough the tallest boy could stand without bending over. They nailed some boards together for a door and propped it against the opening with a big stone.

“Where was it?” I asked. “I’ve never been in a cave. I’d like to see it?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know where it is. It was somewhere here on my dad’s land. He has nearly four hundred acres. My uncle tried to find it one day when he was visiting, but he couldn’t remember where it was. He said everything had grown up so much and changed. He said it might have fallen in, and he doubted if it was still here. He is really my daddy’s uncle, so he is in his sixties. It was a long time ago when he was 14. He told me that he and the other boys used to pretend they were pirates, and the cave was where they stored their treasures. 

"What kind of treasures did a bunch of teenagers have?” I inquired.

“I asked him that. He said back then you could find a lot of arrow heads and other carvings Indians had left behind. This used to be Choctaw land. The boys all collected those relics, and one boy brought a tin can filled with dimes, quarters, halves and silver dollars to add to the treasure.”

Dana continued, "My great grandpa, who was his papa, owned a store. For a couple of years, they were putting baseball cards in Cracker Jacks boxes. All of the boys were big baseball fans. They were all buying Cracker Jacks at a nickel a box for the cards. Some of the cards had sticky syrup on them. Then, they found out if they sent in a quarter and some box tops, they could get a whole clean set. There were many sets so the guys saved their quarters, and each one of them ended up with 144 clean baseball cards. One of the other guys had some earlier baseball cards which had been put into packages of tobacco. All of those baseball cards, plus some toy metal trucks and cars, the money, and the Indian artifacts were put into a big metal box. They piled a little dirt on it to hide it, in case anyone found their cave.”

“I’m sure they must have taken all their treasures with them when they stopped playing there. What was the reason they quit going to the cave?” I asked her.

“Oh, I remember what he said. He said a tornado came and blew the original house away. It took months to get the house rebuilt, and there were so many trees down and so much rubble all over the land they never went back. That’s why he thinks the cave might be gone.”

“It’s possible the cave could still be there,” I told her. “The land is mostly flat around here. There can’t be that many hills to dig into. “If they didn’t go back, their treasure could still be there. It might be more valuable by now. It’s worth checking out. Let’s take a couple of the horses and ride over the place and see if we can find the cave.”

Dana liked the idea, but the cave wasn’t easy to find. We had to make six trips, and we kept getting lost. At last, our persistence paid off.

“Look!” I shouted. “Over there where all of those limbs and rotting wood is piled up. Doesn’t that look almost like a rotted door. Let’s go over and check it out."

It took an hour to move all the junk from around the door. Apparently, a tree had fallen in front of the cave during the storm, but most of it had rotted away. When we started working with the door, it crumbled and fell apart. “Did you remember the flashlight?” I asked.

“Here you go, but we should have brought a shovel. There is so much dirt built up around the entrance.”

We took sticks and finally loosened enough dirt we could get inside by partly crawling. The flashlight showed the cave wasn’t in the best shape. There was one spot that looked as though something was buried, but not too deeply. After another half hour had past, we managed to get the metal box loose. It was heavy, and it was locked. We had to get it back to Dana’s house to pry it open.

When we, at last, got into the box, we found all the baseball cards inside of fruit jars. That had kept them dry and in mint condition. The first thing Dana did was to call her uncle. He was pleased and surprised we had actually found the cave. “It’s all yours to keep girls. You deserve it. A couple of the guys have passed on, and I haven’t kept up with the others, but I’m sure they would want you to have anything we left there. You two divide everything up. I’d hold on to those cards, and take care of them. Someday, they may be worth something.”

Seventy years have passed since we found the cave. We had almost forgotten our adventure. Today, Dana and I got together and laid out our treasures. We went on the Internet to see if enough time had passed to make what we were holding worth our while. We soon realized, the prices vary wildly depending on the vender. We’ll need an expert to help us sort it out.

Still, when we saw a single Ty Cobb card going for between $35,000 and $250,000, and we learned the Shoeless Joe card was even rarer, we didn’t even bother checking the silver prices. Cracker Jacks have never sounded so good.

We have seven excellent sets of each with 144 excellent cards and a lot more with a few syrup and tobacco stains. I’m thinking our remaining retirement years just took a turn for the better.