We ran into Vineyard Haven and anchored for the night. It was an
interesting old place, but Mr. Browning said it couldn’t touch Edgartown
or Nantucket. There was no sign of the black yacht, and I began to feel
pretty safe, and so did Mr. Topper—for once. He got quite jolly, and I
heard him say to Mr. Browning that maybe he had been mistaken after all.
He said he was so nervous that he suspected everybody of following him,
and he guessed for once he had been mistaken.
Well, Catty and I had our own idea about that, but we didn’t say so. I
told Catty I thought we ought to tell how we had sent the _Porpoise_ off
on a wild-goose chase to Nantucket, but he said to keep my mouth tight
closed about it.
“We aren’t supposed to know anything about this treasure, or whatever it
is,” says he, “and nobody’s asked us to help. What we know we’ve found
out for ourselves, and until they ask us, or tell us about it, it
wouldn’t be good manners for us to say anything.”
“Maybe,” says I, “but it don’t seem like very good manners to go butting
in like we have, then.”
“That’s different,” says he. “You don’t have to be introduced to a
drowning man before you can jump in and save him. Here we find these men
in a fix, and we do the best we can to pull them out, but that doesn’t
entitle us to let on we’ve discovered a secret they want to keep from
us.”
I couldn’t see it that way, and I didn’t make any sense out of the way
he reasoned it, but there it was, and I didn’t want to start an
argument. We had plenty of argument aboard with Naboth and Rameses III.
“I wonder if Captain Kidd buried this treasure,” says I, because I liked
to talk about it. It got me kind of excited to talk about treasure and
pirates and digging in lonely places where you might run into a skeleton
with his finger pointing to a chest. Catty liked it, too, but he let on
he didn’t.
“Huh,” says he.
“A chest full of pieces-of-eight—whatever they are—and gold cups and
jewels and all that. I hope they let us come along when they dig it up,
don’t you?”
“When who digs up what?” says Mr. Browning, who just came up out of the
cabin without our hearing him.
“Why,” says Catty, “if you and Mr. Topper were going to dig for buried
treasure, Wee-wee and I thought we’d like to go along.”
Mr. Browning laughed, and then he got sober all of a sudden. “What made
you think of that? How did you get it into your heads Topper and I were
going to dig for something?”
“Well, almost every place we’ve been, you’ve told us about how pirates
used to be around, and we thought maybe we might run onto a treasure or
something. And there was that black yacht——”
“What about the black yacht?”
“It looked kind of like it might be a pirate.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Mr. Browning, “and that is that
you’ve got sharper ears than Topper and I gave you credit for having.”
“Maybe so,” says Catty.
“And you know we’re after something.”
“We’ve got our suspicions.”
“Know what it is?”
“No, sir.”
“Um.... Well, you’re not likely to find out,” he said, and then he
grinned like he had a whale of a joke on us.
“Laugh ahead,” says Catty, when he had gone forward. “Maybe we’ve got a
bigger joke on you.”
We got out the phonograph and played it a while, and then turned in, and
slept like logs. In the morning we took our time, and after breakfast,
started for Edgartown, around the corner of the island. It wasn’t a long
run, but when we got there we’d have been willing to have gone a long
ways to see it. There was a fine harbor and lots of yachts, and some old
fishing boats, and the town ashore. Why, you could imagine it was still
a harbor for whalers like it was once. The old town looked like it might
be, and I says to Catty that I bet almost everybody who lived there was
an old sea captain or his family. We went ashore and bought some post
cards to send home, and to send a telegram for Mr. Browning and see if
there were any messages for him.
We asked the man.
“What yacht did you say?” says he.
“The _Albatross_,” says Catty.
“Hain’t got a message for you,” says he, “but one just came in _about_
you.”
“No,” says Catty, pretending he was astonished.
“Know a yacht by the name of the _Porpoise_?” says he.
“Yes.”
“Message’s for her,” says he. “Where is she?”
“Nantucket, or somewheres.”
“Expect to meet her?”
“Sort of.”
“Wa-al, I kind of figgered so. This telegram says you started out like
you was heading here, and to be sure to keep track of you.”
“Much obliged,” says Catty, and we went out.
“There,” says he, “that shows they’re taking no chances. They’re having
us watched and reported, as well as following us with the _Porpoise_.
We’re going to have a job dodging them.”
“You bet,” says I, “especially if we’re heading for Nantucket to run
right into them.”
Naboth was waiting for us in the dinghy and took us aboard again. As we
ran up the jacob’s ladder there was Mr. Browning waiting to see if we
had a telegram for him.
“Nothing for you,” says Catty, “but there was a message about us.”
“About us?”
“To the _Porpoise_,” says Catty. “It said we were headed for here, and
to keep track of us.”
“Um....” says Mr. Browning, and he called to Mr. Topper. “Hey, listen to
this news,” says he, and then told him.
I thought Mr. Topper would throw a conniption fit.
“There,” says he, “didn’t I tell you? When Jonas P. Dunn goes after a
thing, he goes after it.”
“But he doesn’t always get it,” says Mr. Browning.
“Say,” says Catty, “is it fair to ask a question?”
“Maybe,” says Mr. Browning.
“Where are we heading?”
“Nantucket.”
Catty looked at me and I looked at him. The fat was in the fire for
sure. Nantucket!
“Isn’t there any other place we can go?” says Catty.
“Why?”
“Because,” says Catty, “that’s where the _Porpoise_ is.”
“She is! How do you know?”
“We sent her there.”
“What!”
“We sent her there. Might as well own up. We couldn’t help overhearing
how Mr. Topper was afraid the black yacht was a pirate or something
following us, and that we were on a cruise after treasure. So Wee-wee
and I cooked up a scheme to get rid of them so we could sneak off where
they couldn’t find us.”
“Um.... What kind of a scheme?”
“Why, we found an old chart of Nantucket—it was when we were in
Padanaram—and we kind of marked it up to look like a treasure map, and
we sat on the porch of the yacht club’s station looking at it when one
of the pirates—his name is House—came along and got curious.... We gave
him the chart, and he took his old yacht off to dig where we had made a
cross mark.”
Mr. Browning threw back his head and laughed so I thought he would bust.
“Listen to that, Topper. We should have taken in these kids on the
start. They know how to cruise after treasure. Ho....”
“A fine mess they’ve made of things,” says Mr. Topper.
“Might be worse. Anyhow, we’re sure now. No mistake. And we know where
they are.”
“But we’ve got to go to Nantucket.”
“Sure. They’d have followed us anyhow. Now they’re interested in this
chart, and they’ll be digging all over the place. It’ll keep them
occupied. They think they’ve got something, and it will give us a chance
to do our bit of business and be off for home.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like it. Say, where did you kids make your cross for
them to dig?”
“Here’s a chart,” says Catty. “I’ll show you.”
He did, and pointed with his finger to the place we had marked for the
_Porpoise_ men to do their digging. I heard Mr. Topper make a funny
noise, and I looked from him to Mr. Browning, and he looked as if
somebody had hit him in the stomach.
“However did you come to pick that locality?” says he.
“Why,” says Catty, “it looked like a likely place for treasure to be
buried.”
“It is,” says Mr. Browning. “It’s all-fired likely. I’ll bet they’re
digging now within a hundred feet of where the thing is hid that we’re
going after.”
“It looks,” says Catty, “as if we’d made a mess of things.”
“It does,” says Mr. Browning, “but you can’t tell. Anyhow, it was our
fault for not taking you into the secret a little more. Then you
wouldn’t have got to letting your imaginations run wild all over the
Atlantic Coast. But it’s done. They’re there, and what we want is
there—and we’ve got to go there, and there you are.”
“We’ll think up another scheme for you,” says Catty, and then Mr.
Browning laughed again. “I’ll bet you will,” says he. “Well, we might as
well face the music.... Naboth, up with the anchor. Tell Tom to start
the engine.”
“You’re going to run right into them?” says Mr. Topper.
“May as well be soon as late,” says Mr. Browning, and in ten minutes we
were under way.
Quite a fog had come up, and before we got past the point we had lost
the lightship and were navigating by compass, with our fog horn tooting
like all git out. Everybody was on the lookout for buoys and stakes and
bells marked on the chart, but the farther we went the less we saw, and
then the engine began to act up and snort and miss, and all at once she
laid down and went to sleep. It was a mess. The tide was going out, and
it looked to me like we had a fine chance to be swept between Martha’s
Vineyard and Nantucket, right out to sea—and the nearest land that was,
if I guessed right, was a country by the name of Spain. I didn’t want to
go to Spain.
But we didn’t go there. Tom got the engine tinkered up, and we started
off again through the fog. Mr. Browning said the compass was a little
off, and he wasn’t sure where we were exactly, but he kind of hoped we
would come out right. Well, I can tell you I was glad when we heard a
bell, and ran up to it to get its number. Then we found it on the chart
and knew where we were. In another hour we were running through the
rock-banked channel into Nantucket Harbor.
I was kind of disappointed at first, because from where we were it
looked like a summer colony, with cottages all along the shore, but when
we rounded the lighthouse into the harbor and could see the rows of old
wharves, and the fishing boats, and a big Cape Cod cat making out with a
bunch of fishermen aboard, I felt better. There was the old town, off
our port bow, and it looked more interesting than anything we had seen
yet.
But there was something that was even more interesting than the town.
There, anchored off the beach with her nose pointed into the tide, was a
black yacht, and her name was the _Porpoise_.
“Guess we’ll drop our hook as far from her as possible,” says Mr.
Browning, and that is what we did—keeping out of the channel where the
steamers from New Bedford come in, so as not to get ourselves run down.
“Well,” says Catty, “here we are, and there they are.”
“And over yonder,” says I, pointing with my thumb, “is the treasure.”
“I’ll bet you a fish,” says Catty, “that we get it and they don’t.”
“All I ask,” says Mr. Browning, “is that you don’t make any more plans
for anything till you tell me what they are.”
“I won’t,” says Catty; and then, after a pause, “if I can help it.”
But as things turned out, he couldn’t help it.