“But why should the mate come to me about it?” Brandon asked himself. “Why need he let me know anything about the papers, or the treasure, if he wished to recover it himself? Didn’t he know where on the brig the money was hidden? Or didn’t the papers tell that?”
He cudgled his brains for several minutes to think where his father would have been likely to hide anything of value on the brig. Was there any place which only he and his father had known about?
This idea suggested a train of reminiscences. He had been aboard the Silver Swan several times while she lay in Boston, and had been all over her.
Once, possibly four years before (it seemed a long time to him now), he had been alone with his father in the cabin, and Captain Tarr had shown him an ingeniously hidden sliding panel in the bulkhead, behind which was a little steel lined cavity, in which the captain kept his private papers.
Perhaps Caleb Wetherbee did not know about this cupboard, and it was this information that he wished to get from him. The idea seemed probable enough, for if he did not know where the treasure was hidden on the brig, what good would the papers relating to it be to him?
“There may be a fortune there, just within my grasp, and yet I not be able to get at it,” muttered Don, pacing the rough path nervously.
“Despite his former confidence in this Wetherbee, father must have doubted him at the last and not dared to take the treasure (if treasure it really is) when he left the brig.
“Instead, he gave him these papers, hoping the fellow would be honest enough to place them in my hands; but, still fearing to fully trust the mate, he wrote his directions to me so blindly, that Wetherbee is all at sea about what to do.
“Wetherbee knows that the brig is afloat—this clipping proves that—and he hoped to get the information he wanted from me and then go in search of the Silver Swan. Why can I not go in search of it myself?”
The thought almost staggered him for an instant, yet to his boyish mind the plan seemed feasible enough. He knew that derelicts are often carried by the ocean currents for thousands of miles before they sink, yet their movements are gradual, and by a close study of the hydrographic charts he believed it would be possible to locate the wrecked brig.