The Rival Campers Afloat; or, The Prize Yacht Viking

by Ruel Perley Smith

He looked into it earnestly, but there was clearly nothing of value in it, nor anything queer in its construction. He opened the door to the locker, and pounded on the bottom of that.

“There’s nothing odd about that, so far as I can see,” he exclaimed. “Well, it’s in behind there. That’s where it is. I’ll just get a light and take a look.”

The squire hurried to the provision locker, rummaged therein, and found the stub of a candle. He nearly burned his fingers in lighting it, so wrought up was he.

Returning to the opening whence he had withdrawn the drawer, he got down on his hands and knees and peered within. The candle-light flickered on the little drawer that fitted snugly to the under side of the locker’s bottom. The squire felt a queer, almost choking sensation come over him. He thought of the jewel robbery of the year before, up at Benton. He thought of the men that had had the Viking. The possibilities of his find swept through his excited brain, till the fancy fired his imagination beyond his hitherto wildest dreams.

In a delirium of expectation, and breathing short and quick like a man that has run a race, the squire snatched at the tiny knob, grasped the little drawer with eager hands, drew it forth, and rushed with it to the cabin door.

For one brief, ecstatic moment he paused exultantly. Then a strange, remarkable change came over him and he stood like a man stiff frozen. The look of anguish, of rage, of disappointment, of amazement that distorted his features was like that which an ingenious South Sea Islander might give to an image he had carved out of a very knotty and cross-grained junk of wood.

He held the drawer out at arm’s length, as though he was demanding that some imaginary person should look and behold the contents. And the contents, that the squire’s own eyes rested upon, were indeed not silver nor gold nor precious jewels, nor even the tawdriest trinkets, but—of all abominations—Henry Burns’s lobster-claw!

A moment later, the squire uttering an exclamation that shall not be recorded here, lifted the drawer above his head, hurled it down upon the floor, and crushed it with his heel. Once, twice, thrice he stamped upon it, shattering it to pieces, and crunching the lobster-claw into a shapeless mass. And then—why then, all at once, it flashed into his mind that he had, in his fury, done precisely the wrong thing; the very thing he should not have done.

If any one had put that claw in there for him to find, why, of course, they would look for it when the Viking was returned. It was bad enough to be cheated, defrauded, robbed—thought the squire. But to know that Henry Burns and Jack Harvey and all the rest of the scamps would look for that drawer, and find it missing, and laugh themselves sick to think of his discomfiture, why, that was not to be thought of.

Squire Brackett stooped down and gathered up the pieces of the shattered drawer. Fortunately, they were of common pine, and were mostly wrenched apart where they had been nailed together. The squire hunted for hammer and nails in the yachtsmen’s stores, and hammered the drawer together as best it would go. He cast loose the line astern and pushed the yacht in to the pier again. Then he hunted around, outside of a boat-shop near by, till he found, a small piece of wood that would do, with proper shaping, to supply one of the parts he had broken.