“Yes, you do,” he stated. “But I’m not, I’m different. I figure things out. I’m smart. I got ideas.”
“I’m sure you have,” I murmured, and waited for what I hoped was coming. But Hamish just went on writing. At any rate he was keeping his own counsel in the approved manner of the perfect sleuth.
The day was perfection and, as I lay there on the warm sand and gazed out over the blue bay with its flecks of white where it met the sea, the question of why someone had written something in an old letter grew suddenly unimportant in the face of that bigger wonder of earth and sea and sky. Then I fell to remembering another blue bay on the other side of the world across which I had sailed away from Mother and Dad nearly a year ago.
“Sandy’s being homesick!” Eve’s mellow voice broke into my thoughts.
I sat up. “No such thing!” I declared stoutly. “I was just thinking that a blue emerald couldn’t hold a candle to the color of that water out there!”
I caught a glint of appreciation in Michael’s eyes as he stood with the shallow water swirling about his ankles. But Hamish said, “Guess you wouldn’t talk like that if you should see it once! Chap I talked to this morning said it was as big as a quarter!”
“What!” exclaimed Hattie May. “Why, Hamish, you never told me!”
“Had this chap seen the blue emerald?” Eve inquired.
“Well, no, not exactly. But he’d heard his folks talk about it when he was a youngster.”
“So far as I can discover,” said Eve, “no one ever did see the thing.”