Everybody was very much excited! Lured by some will-o-the- wisp that lurks in waves and beaches they had lost their way it seems between one dune and another, staggered up sand- hills, fallen down sand-hills, sheltered themselves at last during the worst gust of all "in a sort of a cave in a sort of a cliff" and sustained life very comfortably "thank you" on some cakes of sweet chocolate which George Keets had discovered most opportunely in his big oil-skin pockets!
But most exciting of all they had found a wreck! "Yes, a real wreck! A perfectly lovely—beautiful—and quite sufficiently gruesome real wreck!" the May Girl reported.
Not exactly a whole wreck it had proved to be . . . Not shattered spars and masts and crumpled cabins with plush cushions floating messily about. But at least it was a real trunk from a real wreck! Mrs. Brenswick had spied it first. Just back of a long brown untidy line of flotsam and jetsam, the sea-weeds, the dead fish, the old bales and boxes, that every storm brings to the beach, Mrs. Brenswick had spied the trunk lurching up half-imbedded in the sand. It must have come in on the biggest wave of all some time during the night. It was "awfully wet" and yet "not so awfully wet." Everybody agreed that is, that it wasn't water-logged, that it hadn't, in short, been rolling around in the sea for weeks or months but bespoke a disaster as poignantly recent as last night, on the edge of this very storm indeed that they themselves were now frivoling in. For fully half an hour, it appeared before even so much as touching the trunk, they had raced up and down the beach hunting half hopefully, half fearfully for some added trace of wreckage, the hunched body even of a survivor. But even with this shuddering apprehension once allayed, the original discovery had not proved an altogether facile adventure.
It had taken indeed at the last all their combined energies and ingenuities to open the trunk. The Bride had broken two finger nails. George Keets had lost his temper. Paul Brenswick in a final flare of desperation had kicked in the whole end with an abandon that seemed to have been somewhat of an astonishment to everybody. Even from the first young Kennilworth had contested "that the thing smelt dead." But this unhappy odor had been proved very fortunately to be nothing more nor less than the rain-sloughed coloring matter of the Bride's pond-lily hat.
"And here is what we found in the trunk!" thrilled the Bride. In the palm of her extended hand lay a garnet necklace,— fifty stones perhaps, flushing crimson-dark in a silver setting of such unique beauty and such unmistakable Florentine workmanship as stamped the whole trinket indisputably "precious," if not the stones themselves.
"And there were women's dresses in it," explained Paul Brenswick. "Rather queer-looking dresses and——"
"Oh, it was the—the—funniest trunk!" cried the May Girl. "All—" Her eyes were big with horror.
"Anybody could have Sherlocked at a glance," sniffed young Kennilworth, "that it had been packed by a crazy person!"
"No, I don't agree to that at all!" protested the Bride, whose own trunk-packing urgencies and emergencies were only too recent in her mind. "Anybody's liable to pack a trunk like that when he's moving! The last trunk of all! Every left-over thing that you thought was already packed or that you had planned to tuck into your suitcase and found suddenly that you couldn't."
"Why, there was an old-fashioned copper chafing dish!" sniffed young Kennilworth. "And the top-drawer of a sewing- table fairly rattling with spools!"