“And he never had a suspicion,” cried Doris, “that some one had taken it to build that little cave up the river? How perfectly wonderful, Sally!”
“No, but there’s something about it that puzzles me a lot,” replied Sally. “They took it to fix up that cave, sure enough. But, do you realize, Doris, that it only took a small part of a big vessel like that, to build the cave. What became of all the rest of it? Why was it all taken, when so little of it was needed? What was it used for?”
This was as much a puzzle to Doris as to Sally. “I’m sure I can’t imagine,” she replied. “But one thing’s certain. We’ve got to find out who took it and why, if it takes all summer. By the way! I’ve got a new idea about why that cave was built. I believe it was for some one who wanted to hide away,—a prisoner escaped from jail, for instance, or some one who was afraid of being put in prison because he’d done something wrong, or it was thought that he had. How about that?”
“Then what about the queer piece of writing we found?” demanded Sally. Doris had to admit she could not see where that entered into things.
“Well,” declared Sally, at length, “I’ve got a brand new idea about it too. It came from something else Grandfather was telling me last night. If it wasn’t pirates it was—smugglers!”
“Mercy!” cried Doris. “What makes you think so?”
“Because Grandfather was telling me of a lot of smugglers who worked a little farther down the coast. They used to run in to one of the rivers with a small schooner they cruised in, and hide lots of stuff that they’d have to pay duty on if they brought it in the proper way. They hid it in an old deserted house near the shore and after a while would sell what they had and bring in some more. By and by the government officers got after them and caught them all.
“It just set me to thinking that this might be another hiding place that was never discovered, and this bit of paper the secret plan to show where or how they hid the stuff. Perhaps they were all captured at some time, and never got back here to find the rest of their things. I tell you, we may find some treasure yet, though it probably won’t be like what the pirates would have hidden.”
Doris was decidedly fired by the new idea. “It sounds quite possible to me,” she acknowledged, “and what we want to do now is to try and work out the meaning of that queer bit of paper.”
“Yes, and by the way, you said quite a while ago that you had an idea about that,” Sally reminded her. “What was it?”