"Mine have a cave," said Polly, mysteriously. "It is on an island—I know what island I am going to have—and there they hide their treasures. They are counterfeiters, too," she added to their list of crimes, "and they have chests of counterfeit money—sand dollars."
Molly laughed and Polly looked at her reproachfully. "It is as good as any other counterfeit money," she remarked.
"Never mind the money. Go on, Polly." Molly was enjoying her cousin's inventions.
"Well, they go out in a boat on stormy nights and when a vessel is in distress, instead of helping, they don't do anything but just wait till the vessel is wrecked and then they help themselves, to what they can get. They have, oh, such a store of diamonds and rubies and precious stones in their cave, and they have their own vessel that flies a black flag."
"Then they're pirates," said Mary recoiling. "I don't want the Hips to be pirates."
"They don't have to be," Polly calmly assured her. "They can be as good as they want to, and can be on one of the vessels that gets wrecked."
"Then they'll all get drowned."
"No, they needn't; they can cling to a raft and go ashore on some desert island."
Having saved the lives as well as the reputations of the Hips family, although they would probably lose everything else, Mary was satisfied, but Molly was ready to compromise. A little spice of wickedness seemed necessary to make her Applebys interesting. "My family can be smugglers," she announced, "but I don't want them to be pirates and I don't want them wrecked either. Smugglers aren't so wicked as pirates; they only bring in things that you ought to pay duty on, Uncle Dick told me, and Mary's father told her that in England almost everything comes in free, and that the United States is as mean as can be about making people pay for what is brought into the country. A lady, Molly saw on the steamer when they came over, had an awful time about a shabby old sealskin coat she'd had for years, and just because she wore it ashore from the steamer, they made an awful fuss about it."
"Well, I don't understand about it, but if the United States said it was wrong, of course it must have been; they are always right," said Polly loyally. "I don't exactly know about smuggling," she confessed, "however, the Roseberries are going to be smugglers."