“Possibly Mouser’s right, and we’re wrong,” he said. “We haven’t much to go on, that’s a fact. Let’s keep our suspicions to ourselves and keep our eyes and ears open. Maybe we can find out something from Takyak without letting him know what we’re driving at.”
This seemed about the only thing to do under the circumstances, but, as it happened, they were enlightened even sooner than they had hoped.
CHAPTER XII
THE LURE OF GOLD
The boys lost no time in hunting up the old Eskimo chief. He remembered them immediately and seemed glad to see them. He made the walrus do tricks for them and talked freely enough of his life and experiences with the circus. But when the boys approached the subject of treasure-hunting he became wary at once, and they could extract little information from him. They were afraid to persist, lest they arouse his suspicions. This was the last thing in the world they wanted to happen, for the idea of sunken treasure had now taken possession of their minds, and if Takyak really knew where any was located, they were full of hope to get a share of it.
The prospects did not appear very bright, however, and more than once Mouser took the opportunity to crow over the other three and remind them that he had “told them so.”
“Such a thing as sunken gold and pieces of eight and all that sort of thing would never happen to me,” he said one day. “If it rained soup, I’d be caught out with nothing but a fork. Besides, what would a treasure ship be doing up around the North Pole? It doesn’t sound plausible.”
“I don’t suppose any treasure ship ever came very far north on purpose,” said Fred, sarcastically. “There’s always a chance that it might have been blown up in a storm, though. Stranger things than that have happened.”
“Yes, but not often,” retorted his gloomy friend. “I’d give my share in the loot to be sitting back on the old porch at home, eating real honest-to-goodness crullers and enjoying life, instead of staggering around the north Atlantic in this forsaken apology for a ship.”
“Oh, you’ll feel mighty different when you get your pockets full of nice, chinking, yellow gold,” grinned Bobby. “You won’t wish then that you hadn’t been let in for this involuntary ocean voyage. Look at the bright side of it, and maybe you’ll feel less doleful. You go around looking as though you’d lost your last friend.”