He pointed to where a complicated series of fine lines that came together had made a small smear, instead of a sharp, well-defined pattern.
“You’d never find sloppy work like that on a genuine government bill,” Sandy said, pointing to this and to another telltale spot his sharp eyes had uncovered.
“I see what you mean,” Jerry said. “Boy, there must be more than a million dollars’ worth of this useless stuff in that food locker!”
“It’s not so useless to someone,” Sandy returned. “Whoever made this stuff and is responsible for it is sure making real money out of it in the end—and an awful lot of real money, too!”
Jerry nodded thoughtfully, then said, “Where do you suppose it’s coming from?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out,” Sandy answered. “That man on the island was pretty nervous about having any unexpected guests, I’d say. I’ll bet you this whole stack of money that he’s behind the whole thing, and that this is his boat that we’re on!”
“You must be right,” Jerry said. “From the way that he came racing down that path with his gun yesterday, he must have been watching us all along, yet he didn’t come to stop us until we had dropped our anchor, lowered our sails, and were halfway in to shore in the dinghy! We should have realized when he didn’t stop us sooner what that meant. It meant that something funny was going on here!”
“That’s right!” Sandy agreed. “He must have been expecting somebody else to come along in this boat—the same class and colors as ours—and he thought that we were whoever he was expecting—until he saw us in the dinghy! That’s why he was acting so confused and excited that he didn’t know whether to shoot at us, or to be nice and let us get our water and be on our way. We really caught him off guard!”
“Right,” Jerry said. “And now we’ve confused the boats the same way he did, and we’ve caught him off guard again!”
Sandy sat looking silently at the counterfeit five-hundred-dollar bill, frowning. Then he looked up at his friend and said, “The question now is, what are we going to do about it? We’re pretty lucky that we weren’t seen coming on board this boat, but do you think our luck is going to last? I’m worried that we won’t be able to get away from here again without being seen.”