“Ship’s-clocks,” laughed Jack, “and dozens of them, from the noise! I guess they won’t hurt us. Come on.”
They stepped inside again just as the last clang died away, and Jack opened the door as far as it would go to afford more light. When they could finally see each of the boys gave expression to his astonishment.
“Gee!” exclaimed Bee.
“Well!” cried Jack.
Hal grunted. “It’s a regular robber’s den,” he said.
The cabin was perhaps fourteen feet one way by twelve the other. Under the window was a small table with the remains of a meal on it. In one corner was a cook-stove, with a cupboard above it in which stood cooking utensils and a few groceries. In another corner was a bed. Perhaps bunk would describe it better, for it was built against the two walls for all the world like a ship’s berth. There was a seaman’s chest near the stove, a rocking chair near the door and a stool by the table. The floor was partly hidden by pieces of oilcloth and scraps of carpets. The walls had been at some time covered with paper, wrapping paper, newspaper, colored pictures, but over the paper hung as remarkable a collection of objects as one is likely to find outside a museum. Ship’s-clocks—Bee counted fourteen of them later—and sextants, quadrants, spy-glasses, lanterns, barometers, log-lines, rusty cutlasses and swords, a carbine or two and a flint lock musket, pictures of sailing vessels, flags and signals, brass rowlocks in bunches, a ship’s name-board bearing in faded gilt letters the inscription Susan T. Moody, the model of a full-rigged five-master in a glass case and, last of all, a parrot in a cage. It was Bee who first spied the parrot and tiptoed up to it.
“Hello, Polly,” he said softly. But Polly refused to even wink. “Pretty Poll! Polly want a cracker?” The parrot regarded him fixedly with glassy eyes.