“You landed from the creek?” Ben asked.
“Yes; we didn’t want you to see us, and the creek was on the other side of the island from your camp.”
“And one of you took off his shoes before he landed?” Ben questioned again.
“Yes, Martin did. He carried Miss Lawson ashore.” Hastings laughed. “You saw his footprints, didn’t you? We thought you might find them, so we came back later and rubbed them out.”
“Gigantic footprints,” murmured David.
They all laughed, while Martin Locke blushed red.
“Yes, they are pretty big,” Hastings continued. “Well, when we came that time we found the notebooks in the drawing-room. Miss Lawson glanced through them, and read that part about a mahogany man with long, skinny legs and the clipper ship. We got an old piece of parchment and some purplish ink and we wrote out that message and signed it James Sampson. Then we cut it in two and put one-half in the secret drawer of the secretary and the other half in the model of a ship in the attic. We wanted to find out just how clever you were. We thought you might take the desk to be the mahogany man.”
“We got the idea of that from something Sally Hooper said,” Ben put in. “And the secretary certainly has long, skinny legs and is made of mahogany. Still, we mightn’t have connected it with Sir Peter’s mahogany man, if it hadn’t been for Sally.”
“Well, if you hadn’t,” Hastings continued, “we’d have thought up some other way to have you find that message on the parchment. We were very proud of that little scheme. Martin wrote the letters with his left hand, so they’d look as if Sir Peter’s servant might have done them, and he put water into the ink, so as to give it a nice, antique, faded appearance. We wanted you to have the fun of finding some sort of a treasure, you see.”
“And didn’t you take a look around for the real treasure mentioned in the note in the picture frame?” Tuckerman asked.