CHAPTER II
MYSTERY
Doris received the object from Sally, and stood looking at it by the light of the candle It was a small, square, flat, tin receptacle of some kind, rusted and moldy, and about four inches long and wide. Its thickness was probably not more than a quarter of an inch.
"What in the world is it?" she questioned wonderingly.
"Open it and see!" answered Sally. Doris pried it open with some difficulty. It contained only a scrap of paper, which fitted exactly into its space. The paper was brown with age and stained beyond belief. But on its surface could be dimly discerned a strange and inexplicable design.
"Of all things!" breathed Doris, in an awe-struck voice. "This certainly is a mystery, Sally. What do you make of it?"
"I don't make anything of it," Sally averred. "That's just the trouble. I can't imagine what it means. I 've studied and studied over it all winter, and it does n't seem to mean a single thing."
It was indeed a curious thing, this scrap of stained, worn paper, hidden for who knew how many years in a tin box underground. For the riddle on the paper was this:
"Well, I give it up!" declared Doris, after she bad stared at it for several more silent moments. "It's the strangest puzzle I ever saw. But, do you know, Sally, I'd like to take it home and study it out at my leisure. I always was crazy about puzzles, and I'd enjoy working over this, even if I never made anything out of it. Do you think it would harm to remove it from here?"
"I don't suppose it would," Sally replied; "but somehow I don't like to change anything here, or take anything away, even for a little while. But you can study it out all you wish, though, for I made a copy of it a good while ago, so's I could study it myself. I usually have it with me. Here it is."
And Sally pulled from her pocket a duplicate of the strange design, made in her own handwriting.
At this point Genevieve suddenly became restless, and, clinging to Sally's skirts, demanded to "go out and play in the boat."
"She does n't like to stay in here very long," explained Sally.
"Well, I don't wonder!" declared Doris. "It's dark and dreary and weird. It makes me feel kind of curious and creepy myself. But, oh! it's a glorious secret, Sally the strangest and most wonderful I ever heard of. Why, it's a regular adventure to have found such a thing as this! But let's go out and sit in the boat and let Genevieve paddle. Then we can talk it all over and see whether we can make anything out of this puzzle."
Sally returned the tin box and its contents to the hiding-place under the mattress. Then she blew out the candle, remarking, as she did so, that she'd brought a lot of candles and matches and always kept them there. In the pall of darkness that fell on them, she groped for the entrance, pushed it open, and they all scrambled out into the daylight. After that, she padlocked the opening and buried the key in the sand near by and announced herself ready to return to the boat.
During the remainder of that sunny afternoon they sat together in the stern of the boat, golden head and auburn one bent in consultation over the strange combination of letters and figures, while Genevieve, barefooted, paddled in silent ecstasy in the shallow water rippling over the bar.
"Sally," exclaimed Doris, at length, suddenly straightening and looking her companion in the eyes, "I believe you have some idea about all this that you have n't told me yet! Several remarks you 've dropped make me think so. Now, honestly, have n't you? What do you believe is the secret of this cave and this queer jumble of letters and things, anyway?"
Sally, thus faced, could no longer deny the truth. "Yes," she acknowledged. "there is something I 've thought of, and something else I have n't told you about, too. I was scraping the old moss and stuff off of one of those oak planks one day, just to see what was underneath, and all at once I came on the words, in raised letters, just as they have them on the sterns of vessels:
THE ANNE ARUNDEL
ENGLAND, 1843
Then I knew. Some one had made this cave from the wreck of that vessel, and do you know what I was sure it must have been? Pirates!"
Doris almost tumbled out of the boat in her wonder at hearing this curious solution.
"But it was n't that, after all," went on Sally. "For I asked Grandfather (he's awfully old, nearly ninety!) if he remembered anything about a vessel called the Anne Arundel. And he knew all about how she was wrecked here, one time, and even helped to rescue the people. She was n't a pirate ship at all. But he said a queer thing about her, and that was that her timbers lay about on the beach for two or three months, and then suddenly they all disappeared in one night, and nobody could make out where they'd gone, for there had n't been any storm, or high tide, or that kind of thing. They'd just gone! But he got to telling me something else that gave me my idea. He said there used to be a lot of smugglers around here, who used to work a little farther down the coast. They would run in to some of the small rivers with a schooner they had, hide in an old deserted house the goods they'd taken off the big ocean vessels, and sell them afterward. By and by the government officers got after them and caught them all."
She stopped significantly, but Doris did not appear to see the connection.
"But don't you see?" she continued. "It's as plain as can be. This is a smuggler's cave, made from those old timbers, and somewhere about it is hidden the treasure, whatever it is, and that bit of paper, if we could make anything out of it, is to tell just where to get at it. Probably the smugglers all got caught somewhere, and never got back to their treasure, and never told where it was. Now you know all my secret!"
The magnitude of the thing was so overpowering to Doris that she could make no adequate reply, and only stammered brokenly:
"Oh, Sally—it's wonderful. It's the strangest secret I ever heard of a girl having. Thank you—a thousand times—for letting me into it. Perhaps,—who knows?—we can puzzle it out together!"