third
“Well, there’s a puzzle for you!” he exclaimed, dubiously. “How in the world shall I ever be able to make anything out of that?” But the next moment he gave a chuckle of exultation. “I’ve got part of it already!” he cried. “Lucky I happened to set them down just this way. Those letters, ‘mbers’ must have been part of the word ‘timbers.’ So that, after the first three scraps that I have put down, it reads, ‘sound timbers aboard yacht.’ I’ll get something out of this yet. There’s ‘starboa,’ too. That’s ‘starboard,’ of course. And ‘ays’ below may be ‘stays.’ That might make ‘starboard stays.’”
A look of perplexity came over the squire’s face the next moment.
“The queer thing about this,” he said, reflectively, “is that somebody away from here is writing him about this yacht. Perhaps they don’t mean the Viking. However, I believe that is the boat referred to. Well, he may be only getting advice from some one as to how to examine the yacht—how to look her over. The remark about ‘sound timbers’ sounds like that, anyway. So ho! he isn’t thinking about buying a yacht, eh?”
The squire chuckled.
“I’ll study this over at my leisure,” he said, as he placed the paper with the letters pasted on it carefully away in a drawer. “I’ll figure it out.”
CHAPTER XII.
THE SURPRISE SETS SAIL AGAIN
The work on the Surprise had gone on famously, though it had been a hard task. The labour of cleaning her, inside and out, had been well begun down in the Thoroughfare, but there remained still much to be done after she had been floated up into the harbour of Southport.
First, the boys had brought her in on the beach, at a point a little way up the cove from the Warren cottage, where there was a break in the rocky shore, and a clean strip of sand extended back from the water’s edge. There they had raised her on blocks and shored her up so they could work to advantage.
They swarmed over and in and out of her then like ants in an ant-hill, every boy lending a hand, from the Warren brothers to the campers down below. They scrubbed and scraped her, inside and out, and washed her insides with soap and hot water.