“I couldn’t help it,” declared Sam. “Can you stop a sneeze when you want to?”
“Well, maybe not,” agreed Will. “But we’ll have to go back and tell Mr. Brown we saw this fellow but couldn’t catch him.”
“We’ll have another try for him,” said Sam. “But while we’re here, let’s finish looking around his house. Maybe we can find what ship this came from.”
“All right,” agreed Will.
While the wild man was running as fast as he could to get away from those he probably thought were his enemies, Will and Sam went back to the little wooden house.
They had not looked around very long before Sam saw something that caused him to grasp Will by the arm and point, saying:
“Look at that!”
What Sam pointed to was a name painted on a piece of wood behind one of the chests in the little house. The wood was broken off from a lifeboat, it seemed.
“The Mary Bell!” read Will, for those were the words. “That’s the name of the ship that was wrecked, Sam. That’s where this deckhouse came from—the Mary Bell.”
“Yes,” agreed the other sailor. “And—don’t you remember?—the Mary Bell was the name of the schooner that Mr. Pott sailed on—the Mr. Pott that Bunny and Sue told us about. You know, the man that was pitched off his horse and they took him green apples and buttercups in the hospital. Don’t you remember?”