“Someone has landed at the little creek near the back of the house,” explained Ben, “and since the last rain, too.”
“Someone with enormous feet,” added David. “Now what do you suppose such a person as that could be doing here?”
Tuckerman put his hand into his coat pocket and drew out a very small and crumpled handkerchief. “We found this on a table in the kitchen. My Uncle Christopher only had a negro man-servant. And yet this belonged to a lady,—a very particular lady, I should say, a dainty lady.” He spread the handkerchief out. “With beautifully embroidered initials—A. S. L.” He lifted it to his nose. “And it smells of lavender—and quite fresh, too.”
Solemnly the tiny handkerchief was handed around. Each smelled it and nodded his head.
“Someone’s been in the house,” said Tuckerman, “although all the doors were locked.”
“A lady with enormous feet,” declared David. “My eye, how the plot thickens!”
IV—VISITORS
Two days later the campers were as much at sea as ever regarding the secret to which Crusty Christopher had referred in the note left in the picture frame. They had explored the island and they had explored the house, and neither outdoors nor indoors had provided them with a clue.
John Tuckerman—although David persisted in calling him Professor—was the most exuberant and lively of the four. He delighted in everything,—in the early swim before breakfast, in the cooking and eating, especially in the eating, in sleeping out of doors, and even, it seemed, in washing the dishes. He would sing as he washed, wild, rollicking songs, the words of which he made up as he went along, all about pirates and sailors and sea-serpents, with a great many “Yo-heave-hos” and “Blow the man down, my lads,” by way of chorus; all which he accompanied with a pretended hitching up of his trousers as sailors were supposed to do to cheer them at their work.
“There are times when he almost looks like a pirate,” David whispered to Tom, as they watched Tuckerman sharpening a knife on the sole of his shoe preparatory to sticking it into a cover of a can of baked beans. “Like a pirate, that is, with one exception,—those horn-rimmed spectacles.”