“I must remind you, young man,” he said severely, “that this is not a treasure hunt.”
Whereupon Larry subsided; outwardly, at least. But when presently the central square revealed another and then another sunken ship, it was all he could do to contain himself.
Now, suddenly, Diane cried out:
“Oh, daddy, look! There’s a modern ship! A—a freighter, isn’t it?”
“A collier, I would say,” was her father’s calm reply. “Rather a large one, too. Cyclops, possibly. She disappeared some years ago, en route from the Barbados to Norfolk. Or possibly it is any one of a dozen other steel vessels that have vanished from these seas in recent times. The area of the Sargasso, my dear, is known as ‘The Port of Missing Ships.’”
“But couldn’t we drop down and make sure which ship it is?” she pleaded, voicing the very thought Larry had been struggling to suppress.
At the professor’s reply, however, he was glad he had kept quiet.
“We could, of course,” was his gentle though firm rebuke, “but if we stopped to solve the mystery of every sunken ship we shall probably see during this cruise, we would have time for nothing else. Nevertheless, my dear, you may take a short memorandum of the location and circumstances, in the present instance.”
Whereupon he dictated briefly, while Larry devoted his attention once more to the central square.