“That’s it,” nodded Nicky. “The way I remembered it said ‘in the bottom of the dipper.’ So I changed the word to ‘lowest part’ so I could make it seem that the two islands at the lowest part of the sketch were the ones it meant.”
“Then it was easy to draw the lines,” Tom agreed. “Nicky—I’m ashamed of myself for being angry and for not trusting you!” He made the admission manfully, and extended his hand. “I ask your pardon!”
“You ought to!” declared Nicky, but he grinned to take the sting out of his words.
Cliff was not behind Tom by more than a sentence. He, too, told his chum how sorry he was that he did not trust him. Nicky was glad to grip hands with both and to forget their former distrust.
“I didn’t pretend to notice because I wanted you both to act as though you were mad at me. It would make them believe I was telling the truth, I thought,” he explained.
“Let’s row in and see what the real ‘in the bottom of the Dipper’ looks like,” he added. “I’m nearly wild to see the real treasure spot, even if we can’t locate anything there.”
But Cliff counseled caution.
“Those fellows aren’t quite out of sight yet,” he declared, “and they might be watching. If we pretend to row along the same way they are going, until it gets dark, they will believe we have given up too.”
“That’s good sense,” Tom agreed. “When it’s so dark they can’t see us, even if they come back, we can swing in and camp out on some island. Then, if they get soft-hearted and return to pick us up, they won’t suspect anything.”
This was agreed to and they rowed along easily for about an hour. There was no sign, strain their eyes as they might, that the Libertad was anywhere else than on the first leg of her journey to Jamaica, so they pulled to the shore of an islet that had a small grove of cocoanut or mangrove trees—it was too dark to know which—and, though their couch was not very dry and rather too full of matted roots for comfort, the expectation of the morning’s find, and their own athletic training, enabled them to make the best of what they had.