“Well, you won’t find anything more in your mahogany man’s breast pocket,” Tom answered. “You can see for yourself it’s empty.”
“My idea is,” said David, “that we get the Argo and sail round the island till we sight a likely-looking cliff.”
“That appeals to me,” agreed Tuckerman, “and Tom can give me another lesson in how to handle a boat.”
The parchment was put in its drawer, the three drawers replaced, the cupboard pushed back and caught by its spring, and the desk-lid lifted and locked.
“I’d a heap rather hunt for clues out of doors on a day like this,” said David.
But Ben sat down on a divan. “I want to do a little thinking, fellows. You go along without me. Maybe I’ll go fishing for dinners off the rocks after a while.”
They laughed at Ben; but he would not be dissuaded. He wanted to do some thinking, and he meant to. “Stubborn as a mule,” said Tom. “He gets his mind set on a thing, and dynamite won’t budge him.”
So the others went down to the sailboat; and presently Ben, getting up from the divan, went out and cut himself a stick of willow. He brought it back and began to whittle shavings all over the hardwood floor of Cotterell Hall. He had seen men down on the Barmouth docks whittle shavings for hours, and he had copied the habit. He found it a great help when he wanted to think things out.
VI—THE CLIPPER SHIP
Ben Sully was a boy who would rather work out a puzzle than do almost anything else. He had a tremendous amount of patience, which possibly explains why he was such a successful fisherman, since he could wait longer, dangling a piece of bait in the water, than nine out of ten fishes could resist the temptation to find out what the bait tasted like. Any kind of a puzzle, from cut out sections of cardboard that fitted together to make a picture all the way to ingenious contraptions of metal links that didn’t want to come apart, was a delight to Ben. He had boxes and boxes of them stored away in a closet at home. He had invented secret codes and cryptograms by the score, and when he was only ten years old had constructed a private language of twenty-five words that he had taught to Tom and David and which the three of them had used among themselves to the great admiration and envy of all the rest of their school.