“No, I don’t remember that he did,” said he, finally, “only he wanted to know, of course, if I’d heard anything wrong about the yacht—anything queer about her—or something of that sort—seems to me he asked if there was anything queer about the boat—anything ever discovered about her.”
The squire concealed a thrill of satisfaction by scowling, and exclaimed:
“Well, why didn’t you say so before? I might want to buy that boat, myself, sometime. I want to find out about her.”
A night or two after this, Squire Brackett awoke. He had had another dream: that he and Mr. Carleton had stolen aboard the Viking, in the dead of night, and had broken into the cabin. There, after the strange and impossible fashion of dreams, they had discovered the man, Chambers, at work, tearing up the cabin floor. Then, the dream progressed to a stage wherein Mr. Carleton and Chambers were handing out bags of money to the squire, piling his arms full of them.
By degrees, these bags grew heavier, until the squire sank under their weight. But, to his horror, Carleton and Chambers did not cease heaping the bags of money upon him until he was smothering under them. They covered his face, his nose, the top of his head. He woke up in the midst of a vain endeavour to call for help, in which he could not utter a sound.
Possibly the squire’s dream was explained by the fact that he found himself submerged beneath the bed-clothes, which he had drawn completely over his head, almost stifling himself. His pillow, which he clutched tightly in his arms, rested also on his left ear, like one of the imaginary bags of gold.
“Oh! oh!” he groaned, freeing himself from the weight of clothing, “that was a terrible nightmare. Confound that yacht! I wish it was sunk in the middle of Samoset Bay, and I’d never set eyes on it again.”
But, with this awakening, the old subject of the mystery of the Viking returned to torment him. He lay awake for a half-hour or more, vainly trying to forget it and go to sleep, but finding the paper with the cryptogram forever flitting before his eyes.
Then, of a sudden, he sprang out of bed, with a yell that awakened poor Mrs. Brackett in terror. Her first thought, naturally, was of burglars.
“I have it! I have it!” cried Squire Brackett, dancing about like a certain philosopher of old, “I have it—it’s ‘money!’”