“What I’m wondering about,” interposed Larry, “is what the keg contains. It must be something important or nobody would have taken the pains to bury it and plant a tree over it.”
“And yet,” argued Dick, “if it is anything important, why did anybody bury it away out here and never come back for it?”
“It all depends,” answered Cal, “on just what you mean by ‘important.’ Things are important sometimes and utterly unimportant at others; important to one person and of no consequence to anybody else. At this moment I feel that my breakfast in the morning is becoming a thing of very great importance to me; but I don’t suppose poor Dunbar, wherever he is, cares a fig about it.”
“By the way, what can have become of the poor fellow? I wonder if he managed to fall out of the dory and get drowned?”
It was Tom who asked the question. Cal, who had thought a great deal about the matter, answered it promptly:
“That isn’t likely,” he said. “Indeed, it is scarcely possible. Dunbar was too good a boatman to fall overboard, and too good a swimmer to drown if he did. He would have climbed back into the dory with no worse consequence than a ducking in warm sea water.”
“What’s your theory then, Cal?”
“Why, that he has had one of his peculiar ‘spells.’ You remember that when he was missing from camp the last time he wrote us a letter, but when his lost knife was returned to him he seemed to remember nothing about it. More than that, he seemed to think the day he returned was the same as the day he went away. In other words, his memory was a blank as to the time he was away. Then, too, you remember that when we first found him here he couldn’t remember whether he had come three weeks or four weeks before. Still again, you remember how badly he was mixed up about the date just before he went away this time, and that too in spite of the fact that he had important papers to post before a given time.”
“Then you think he’s crazy?”
“I don’t know about that, because I’m not a doctor or an alienist, or anything else of the kind. But I think he has a way of losing himself now and then, though at ordinary times his head is a remarkably clear one.”