“I probably shan’t get a chance to talk to Grandfather alone before evening,” said Sally in parting, “though I’m going to be around most of the afternoon where he is. But I’ll surely talk to him tonight when he’s smoking on our porch and Mother and Dad are away at the Landing. Then I’ll find out what he knows, and let you know tomorrow morning.”
It was a breathless and excited Sally that rowed up to the hotel at an early hour next day.
“Did he say anything?” demanded Doris breathlessly, flying down to the sand to meet her.
“Come out in the boat,” answered Sally, “and I’ll tell you all about it. He certainly did say something!”
Doris clambered into the boat, and they headed as usual for Slipper Point.
“Well?” queried Doris, impatiently, when they were in midstream.
“Grandfather was good and ready to talk wrecks with me last night,” began Sally, “for there was no one else about to talk to. You know, the pavilion opened for dancing the first time this season, and every one made a bee-line for that. Grandfather never goes down to the Landing at night, so he was left stranded for some one to talk to and was right glad to have me. I began by asking him to tell me something about when he was a young man and how things were around here and how he came to go to sea. It always pleases him to pieces to be asked to tell about those times, so he sailed in and I didn’t do a thing but sit and listen, though I’ve heard most of all that before.
“But after a while he got to talking about how he’d been shipwrecked and along about there I saw how it would be easy to switch him off to the shipwrecks that happened around here. When I did that he had plenty to tell me and it was rather interesting too. By and by I said, just quietly, as if I wasn’t awfully interested:
“ ‘Grandfather, I’ve heard tell of a ship called the Anne Arundel that was wrecked about here once. Do you know anything of her?’ And he said he just guessed he did. She came ashore one winter night, along about 1850, in the worst storm they’d ever had on this coast. He was a young man of twenty then and he helped to rescue some of the sailors and passengers. She was a five-masted schooner, an English ship, and she just drove right up on the shore and went to pieces. They didn’t get many of her crew off alive, as most of them had been swept overboard in the heavy seas.
“But, listen to this. He said that the queer part of it all was that, though her hulk and wreckage lay on the beach for a couple of months or so, and nobody gave it any attention, suddenly, in one week, it all disappeared as clean as if another hurricane had hit it and carried it off. But this wasn’t the case, because there had been fine weather for a long stretch. Everybody wondered and wondered what had become of the Anne Arundel but nobody ever found out. It seemed particularly strange because no one, not even beach-combers, would be likely to carry off a whole wreck, bodily, like that.”