He opened the hatch cover and slid back the doors, then stepped down into the little cabin. As he started forward to the sail lockers, he had a sudden, odd feeling that something was wrong, something out of place; a strange notion that he had seen, out of the corner of his eye, something that was not what it should have been.
Pausing to look around, he saw what had bothered him. Clamped to the bulkhead over the port bunk was a large, oddly shaped brass pistol, like the kind he had always imagined the old-time pirates carried. He had never seen anything like it before—and he was almost positive that it had not been there yesterday!
“Jerry!” he called, sticking his head out of the hatch. “Come here! I want you to see something and tell me what you think.” As Jerry poked his head into the cabin, Sandy gestured at the brass pistol. “Was that thing here yesterday, or have we gotten into somebody else’s boat?”
Jerry brought his dark brows together in a frown and scratched his crew-cut head. “I don’t think it was here. I probably would have noticed it. But maybe we just didn’t see it. We were so busy with other things.”
“But why would Uncle Russ have left a pistol on board?” Sandy asked, puzzled.
“He probably wouldn’t have,” Jerry said. “But he might have left one of these. That’s a flare gun, not a regular pistol at all. You use it as a signal of distress. It shoots a rocket. Still ... I don’t remember seeing it. And I know that your uncle didn’t mention leaving one.”
“Well, I don’t know whether he did or not,” Sandy said, “but we’d better make sure this is our boat before we go sailing it off. If it belongs to that guy on the island, we could get into some pretty bad trouble if we took it by mistake!”
As they looked for some identifying marks, an idea suddenly occurred to Sandy. “Maybe this isn’t our boat, but one just like it, and maybe the man with the gun was expecting it with somebody else on board! That might explain his actions!”
“That makes sense,” Jerry said. “And in that case, we’d better find out fast if it’s ours. Look—our boat didn’t have any name on it, and most boats do. If this has a name, we’ll know.” He hurried to the stern to see, and then to the bow, where some boat owners fasten name plates, but none was to be seen.
“That doesn’t prove anything, though,” Sandy said. “But I have an idea. Let’s look in the food locker. I remember pretty well what was in there yesterday, and I doubt if two boats would have the identical food supplies. One look should tell us.” He reached above the galley stove and slid back the doors of the locker, then stepped backward as if he had been hit.