“Oh, I don’t know as it amounts to much,” said Doris. “So many things have happened since, that I’ve half forgotten about it. But if we’re going up to Slipper Point, I can show you better when we get there. Do you know, Sally, I believe I’m just as much interested if that’s a smuggler’s cave as if it had been a pirate’s. It’s actually thrilling!”
And without further words, they bent their energies toward reaching their destination.
CHAPTER VIII
ROUNDTREE’S
AT Slipper Point, they established Genevieve, as usual, on the old chair in the cave, to examine by candle-light the new picture-book that Doris had brought for her. This was calculated to keep her quiet for a long while, as she was inordinately fond of “picters,” as she called them.
“Now,” cried Sally, “what about that paper?”
“Oh, I don’t know that it amounts to very much,” explained Doris. “It just occurred to me, in looking it over, that possibly the fact of its being square and the little cave also being square might have something to do with things. Suppose the floor of the cave were divided into squares just as this paper is. Now do you notice one thing? Read the letters in their order up from the extreme left hand corner diagonally. It reads r-i-g-h-t-s and the last square is blank. Now why couldn’t that mean ‘right’ and the ‘s’ stand for square,—the ‘right square’ being that blank one in the extreme corner?”
“Goody!” cried Sally. “That’s awfully clever of you. I never thought of such a thing as reading it that way, in all the time I had it. And do you think that perhaps the treasure is buried under there?”
“Well, of course, that’s all we can think it means. It might be well to investigate in that corner.”
But another thought had occurred to Sally. “If that’s so,” she inquired dubiously, “what’s the use of all the rest of those letters and numbers. They must be there for something.”
“They may be just a ‘blind,’ and mean nothing at all,” answered Doris. “You see they’d have to fill up the spaces somehow, or else, if I’m right, they’d have more than one vacant square. And one was all they wanted. So they filled up the rest with a lot of letters and figures just to puzzle any one that got hold of it. But there’s something else I’ve thought of about it. You notice that the two outside lines of squares that lead up to the empty squares are just numbers,—not letters at all. Now I’ve added each line together and find that the sum of each side is exactly twenty-one. Why wouldn’t it be possible that it means the sides of this empty square are twenty-one—something—in length. It can’t possibly mean twenty-one feet because the whole cave is only about nine feet square. It must mean twenty-one inches.”