“Diamonds! Oh, go on, where did you get that stuff?”
“It’s diamonds, Lav.” Then Sidney solemnly repeated what the old Captain had told her concerning the letter and the reward. “He asked me not to tell a soul, but you’re different because you know. And he said that the reward would be posted everywhere in two weeks at least and it’s that long now. Everyone will know soon.”
“Sid, five thousand dollars!” Lavender whistled.
“If someone ’round here’s doing it Cap’n Davies wants to catch him himself. He says he doesn’t want the reward but he wants to punish the man who’s hurting the honest name of this part of Cape Cod. I think that’s a grand spirit.”
Lavender’s shoulders lifted. Why couldn’t someone else save the fair name of Cape Cod—someone like a crippled boy whom most of the towns-people looked upon as a loafer?
“I’d like to catch ’em, myself,” he said slowly in such a low voice that Sidney barely caught the words.
“Oh, Lav, why not? We have as good a chance as anyone, knowing as much as we do. What’ll we do first?” For Sidney was ready for adventure.
Suddenly Lavender realized that he was gripping the knife in his hand. He looked down at it.
“What we ought to do first is to find out how this knife got here. Let’s put it where we found it and go back around the other side of that schooner so’s no one on the Puritan’ll see us. Then we can come out late this afternoon and if it’s gone—well, we’ll know someone came to look for it!”
“And then we’d know for sure that someone had been on the Arabella.”