"It—it was one of the old gun-carriages!" cried Bascom, and sank back upon his austere pillow.
Captain Tony lifted his cap a little, and then pulled it down over his eyes again. Stooping, he measured the two sections of wood. Then, turning to Lazaré, he asked, "Is it a fair divide?"
Lazaré covered his feelings with a comical shrug, but Narcisse and both the crews looked whipped with disappointment, and eyed the innocent old block resentfully. Bascom motioned to have it brought alongside his gun.
"I don't see," he said, afterward, "what better an old party like that could have done, comin' from so far, than to bring his comforts with him instead of presents for folks he didn't know."
Bascom never told what Narcisse had done to him under water, and the gun that had had a share in it was used to keeping its own counsel. It and its comrades were left in his care, and when he saw that they would be awkward ballast on the Mystery, they were piled together on Tony's beach to wait a purchaser. The faith which Bascom had had in them staid with him, although public interest in them died out, and they were forgotten again. But Bascom was always working with them, and polishing them, and talking to them when he had the time.
"It's queer how you all staid there so quiet, and waited hundreds an' hundreds an' hundreds of years—just for me," he said to them. "I wisht I could only find out where you come from, and what you're calculatin' for me to do. You didn't come for nothin', I make sure of that."
But the guns with all their sleeping possibilities of voice lay still.