“No,” said Ben, “I didn’t mean thieves exactly. Detectives come nearer to what I meant.”
Tuckerman chuckled. “Benjamin, you’re a wonder! You never let go of an idea once you get your teeth in it, do you? I’d forgotten all about the treasure. I was studying the stars, and Dave was thinking about baseball, and Tom about the course he’s steering; but you—why, you were puzzling your wits about Sir Peter and the mahogany man, and goodness knows what else. Keep it up, Ben my boy. That’s the road to success.”
And Ben, thinking of what he had found that morning, grinned but said nothing. If he could only work out the scheme he had in his mind, he felt that he would be prouder than if he knocked home runs against the very best baseball pitchers in the major leagues.
IX—THE CHEST IN THE ROCKS
John Tuckerman was leaning on his arm and looking out at the sparkling, gleaming blue-green water when Ben Sully woke next day. Ben kept still and watched him, as he had watched him on several other mornings. Tuckerman looked so absorbed, so intent. He seemed to be sniffing the air. And Ben, to whom a summer morning on the New England coast presented no novelty, appreciated that to this man everything about him seemed like a part of wonderland.
The only sounds were the lapping of waves and the calling of birds in the woods back of the camp. A great gray-white gull was soaring far out over the water, slanting first this way, then that, as though he were trying his wings before he made a real flight. Nearer shore two white terns circled round and round, and then dropped straight in the bay, their sharp beaks darting at fish. The shore of the mainland rose in a green swell, on which pearl-colored fleecy clouds seemed to be floating, and the shore of the island itself, above the beach, was a tangle of bay and juniper and wild roses, all shades of greens and pinks in the early sun.
Ben saw this through Tuckerman’s eyes, and felt the spell of enchantment. Then David rolled over, stretched his arms, grunted; and the spell was broken. A pine-cone, tossed by Ben, landed on David’s nose. “Hi there, you mosquito!” exclaimed the nose’s owner. He threw the pine-cone at Tom. “Time to be up, lazybones. Breakfast in half-an-hour, and those who aren’t down when the bell rings won’t get any!”
“The tub’s mine first!” shouted John Tuckerman, and pulling off his pajamas he took a few leaps across the grass and raced over the sand to the water, where he ducked under a wave and bobbed up again, splashing and yelling.
Ben, then David, then Tom, followed, making more noise between them than all the wildfowl on the island put together. The water was cold, but fine for a morning swim, and when, after fifteen minutes, the four came out on the beach again, they seized the Turkish towels that hung conveniently on a juniper, and rubbed themselves to a brilliant lobster-like glow.
“That particular swimming-pool,” said John Tuckerman,—“I refer to the one commonly called the damp spot, or the ocean,—beats all the porcelain-lined tubs it has ever been my privilege to bathe in. It’s true there’s only cold water; but come out into this sun for a few minutes and you’ll be hot enough. Now it seems to me”—but at that particular moment he began to pull his flannel shirt over his head, and when his words again became audible he was saying “shake well, and take a teaspoonful in a glass of water every morning before breakfast.”