Phyllis at last threw down her knife in disgust and rattled the box impatiently. “Something bumps around in there!” she declared. “I can hear it distinctly, but I don’t believe we’ll ever be able to get at it. I never saw such a queer affair! Let’s try to break it with an ax. Have you one?”
“Oh, don’t do that!” cried Leslie, horrified. “It would surely spoil this beautiful box and might even injure what’s in it. There must be some other way of getting it open if only we take our time and go at it carefully.”
They both sat for several moments regarding their find with resentful curiosity. Suddenly Leslie’s thoughts took a new tack, “How in the world did it ever come there—buried in the sand like that?”
“Thrown up on the beach by the waves, of course,” declared Phyllis, positively; “no doubt from some wreck, and buried in the sand after a while, just naturally, as lots of things are.”
The explanation was a very probable one. “But it’s rather far from the water’s edge,” objected Leslie.
“Oh, no, indeed! Why in winter the surf often comes up right under the bungalows!” remarked Phyllis, in quite an offhanded way.
“Mercy! Don’t ever tell Aunt Marcia that, or she’d go straight home!” exclaimed Leslie. “But isn’t it queer that it just happened to be right in front of Curlew’s Nest! Everything queer seems to happen right around that place.”
“That’s so! I’d almost forgotten the other thing. But what I can’t understand is how your dog happened to dig the thing up.”
“Oh, that’s simple! He’s always chasing hermit-crabs—it’s a great sport of his. And I suppose it just happened that one dug itself down in the sand right here, and he dug after it and then came across this.”
Phyllis had a sudden brilliant idea. “Let’s go and examine the hole! Perhaps there’s something else in it.”