Piet shook his head. "No, it's no cross," he answered. "How can it have come here? I remember once a man who rode on commando, an Englishman, and he had pictures of such things as this on his arms, pricked into the skin. This is an anchor, a piece of a ship."
Klein Piet, standing by his side, laughed suddenly, so short and harsh a laugh that Piet turned to him in surprise.
"I might have known," said Klein Piet. "Of course it is part of a ship. There have been ships here, once; can't you feel that there have been ships hereabouts?"
At another time Piet would have shown little patience with this manner of talk; but now his mind was full of other concerns, and he let it pass.
"We must dig the thing out," he said. "It will be heavy to lift, though. Take a pair of spades and see how big it is."
Klein Piet and Jan jumped down into the pit and set to work, while Andries and Piet watched. It was no hard matter to unbury the shank of the anchor; the easy earth came away in heaping shovelfuls, and presently the whole of it lay bare, with its great wooden stock rotted to threads and its ring pitted and thin with rust. Jan leaned on his shovel and stared at it; Klein Piet knelt by it and swept away earth with his hands.
"Perhaps there was a wreck here," Piet was saying. "Some ship may have been driven up by a storm and the sea have beaten it to pieces, so that all the wooden parts floated away and this was left."
Klein Piet, on his knees, still grubbing away with his hands, laughed at him.
"No," he said. "That is not so, father. For there is a chain fast to this anchor."
He had worried a hole with his hands, and sure enough, when they came to look, there was a link of a great chain running from the anchor ring into the earth.