Code absently thrust his hand into his coat pocket and encountered the mirror he had found aboard the Nettie B. He drew it out and polished its bright surface with his handkerchief.
Elsa was immediately interested and Code told her of its unexpected discovery.
“And he had it!” she cried, laughing. “Of all things!”
“Yes, and he always wanted it. I remember when father first gave it to me and I was working out little problems in astronomy, Nat used to take the thing and handle it and admire it. You see the back and edges are silver-plated and it is really quite valuable. He tried to get his father interested, but, so far as I know, never succeeded.
“It was a strange thing, but that simple mirror appealed to Nat tremendously, and you know how that would act on a man of his nature. He is and always has been utterly selfish, and if there was any object he wanted and could not have it increased his desire.”
“But how did he get it, I wonder?” asked the girl, taking the object and heliographing the bright sun’s rays from the polished surface. “When did you have it last?”
Code knitted his brows and thought back carefully. He had an instinctive feeling that perhaps in this mirror lay the key to the whole situation, just as often in life the most unexpected and trivial things or events are pregnant with great moment.
“I had it,” he said slowly, thinking hard; “let me see: the last time I remember it was the day after my first race with Nat. In the desk that stood in the cabin of the old May I kept the log, my sextant, and a lot of other things of that kind. In a 229 lower drawer was this mirror, and the reason I saw it was this:
“When I had made fast to my moorings in the harbor I immediately went below to make the entry in the log about the race––naturally I couldn’t leave that undone. I remember I looked in the top drawer for the book, but didn’t find it. So then I looked in the other drawers and, in doing so, opened the one containing the mirror.