Marjorie held the bottle up again and stared at it. “You’re right, Judy,” she said. “It looks like a piece of paper. Oh, golly, maybe it’s a map which’ll tell us exactly where the treasure is buried!”
As she talked, Marjorie was prying out the cork with a piece of broken shell.
“Hurry, hurry,” Judy cried impatiently, hopping up and down. “Now you’ve got it out at last. Turn it upside down and shake it, Marjorie. Oh, oh, it is a piece of paper!”
The piece of paper was battered and torn, and it had been crumpled into a small ball. Carefully Marjorie smoothed it out, and together they tried to read the smudged words.
After half an hour of intensive studying they were able to figure out that the scrap was a fragment of a message, and the message had something to do with “the Log Cabin” and “a well that.”
“Oh, Judy,” Marjorie gasped. “The well must be the one we dug up. If we could only find the other fragment, I’ll bet the two together would tell us where the treasure is buried!”
“Who do you suppose wrote the message?” Judy asked wonderingly. “And how did it get torn? And how did one half get into this bottle?”
“I can guess what happened,” Marjorie said, her imagination completely running away with her. “Two men knew about the buried treasure near the old well. They wrote down just where they were supposed to dig. Then they got into a fight when they talked about how they were going to divide the loot. In the tussle, one man got off with one half, and the other put his half in this bottle and buried it here for safekeeping.”
Judy stared at her in admiration. “You’re wonderful, Marjorie,” she said. “That’s just what happened. Now all we have to do is find the other half.”
Marjorie’s elfin blue eyes were bright with suppressed laughter. “All?” she demanded sarcastically. “The other half of the message could be anywhere in the world.” She stared thoughtfully down at the scrap. “The two letters ‘tr’ might be part of the word ‘trunk.’ What do you think, Judy?”