Pirate treasure Or The apple trees

When I was around 10 years old my younger brother and I used to dig out behind my father's shed. We were convinced we would find great treasures like arrowheads or fossils. This was all started by my father's boyhood friend who was an amateur archeologist, and a professional geologist. He was always showing us little plant and trilobite fossils he had found here or there. We even had a collection of geods that he gifted us with every year for Christmas.
Back behind the shed however we never found a thing beside roots and rocks. We decided to move over the fence into the small horse pasture next door. We picked a spot behind some oak trees cut off from view of the owners house and our own house. There was a small pony and a white old mare that lived back there we had been feeding them veggies and sugar since we found out they were there and they never minded us being in their space. We must have dug for over an hour, I remember my brother being up to his waist in this hole when we found a blue glass mason jar full of black moldy coins. Pirate treasure! We were so sure. We took the jar out behind our shed and hid it in one of the holes we had already dug.
For days we went back and dug these giant pits all over the neighbors pasture. Thankfully the pony and horse were old and slow or they might have hurt themselves, but at the time we didn't even consider.
Like all boys do who find trouble we were eventually caught. The neighbor had finally noticed all the new holes and ditches in her yard and understandably she freaked out a little. Her husband waited one afternoon out there hiding in the brush wearing hunting camouflage until we snuck in with our shovels. He jumped out and grabbed us, I just remember trying to run then trying to smack this man I was sure was a Pirates ghost with my shovel. We were dragged none to gently up to the front door of our house. The look on my dad's face made me wish we had run afoul of some pirates. We confessed rapidly to the digging and the jar of coins. The neighbor relented all at once, but my father? Not a chance. He sent us over there to fill up every one of those holes except two. Those two he had us dig wider and deeper until it satisfied him, then he and my older brother took two 5 or 6 year old apple trees out of his own orchard and planted them in the holes.
Then of course came the punishment, with my father reparation always came before punishment, so that the injured party suffered as little as possible. First we had to take the jar of pennies over to the neighbors house. She was very nice and tried to invite us in for some cookies, but Dad would have nothing to do with it. He stood at the edge of the property as we apologizes profusely and ducked out and ran as fast as we could back to our own yard. My father was never averse to the hand or the belt, but sometimes he was just downright creative. Funny we were more scared of those times, this time he took us to a nursery and had us pick out two replacement trees, the finest ones in the lot he said, and we sure found them. Of course after he paid for them came the trick, now we owed him for the trees he had to buy! We had never heard of minimum wage, and in all fairness for how small we were we probably deserved the $.25 per hour he paid us. My dad the Navy engineer even drew up a chart and a log. He checked it weekly against all our chores, marking us down if we tried to fudge the numbers, helping us out if we forgot to note anything. I don't know how long it took us to finish that debt. I never really remember it ending, but knowing Dad he played it fairly to the end, maybe raising our wages as we got better at certain things. My brother and I though got to claim those trees (eventually) even to today my dad will call and say "hey Alan your apples are looking really good. I think you might outdo your brother's this year."