“Wild man?” asked Captain Ward.
“I guess they called me that,” said Harry Pott. And then he told his story—how he had been shipwrecked with the Mary Bell. “My father and I were on board,” explained the long-haired sailor, “when we ran into the big storm. I had been sick for some time and couldn’t do much. My father tried to save me when the ship broke up, but we got separated. He managed to get in a boat, but I couldn’t. I clung to part of the wreckage and got ashore.”
“Didn’t you save the treasure?” asked Bunny Brown.
“What’s this about treasure?” asked Harry Pott. “I never had any, and my father didn’t either, that I know of.”
They told the son what Mr. Pott had raved about in the hospital. Then a look of remembrance came over Harry Pott’s face.
“Oh, I recall now that when my father went off in the lifeboat he called to me about saving the treasure,” he said.
“But what was the treasure?” asked Mr. Brown.
“It must have been something in my father’s sea chest,” said the castaway sailor. “I know he kept very close watch over it and more than once he said to me it contained something valuable. But I was too sick to pay much attention.”
“Then is the treasure lost?” asked Mrs. Brown.
“Well, my father’s chest came ashore with some other stuff,” said Harry Pott. “It’s in the deckhouse now. I’ve never opened it. I was too sad and miserable here, a castaway all by myself.”