HAMISH took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully as if he hoped
by so doing to see something different from the object which was lying
in Michael’s open palm. The object at which the rest of us were also
incredulously staring. It was just a key—a long old-fashioned rusty
key!
“Is—is that all?” Hattie May’s voice at last broke the silence; it
seemed to come from the region of her shoes. For answer Michael took up
the tobacco tin and turned it upside down. “B-but there must be
something else,” she faltered. “Something else buried—the
treasure—the blue emerald!”
With a shrug Michael again picked up the shovel and set to work anew on
the hole. But though he dug steadily for as much as five minutes, he
turned up nothing more.
“It’s just a washout like I said!” Hamish stated gloomily. He glared at
Eve and me, he seemed to hold us responsible.
I had picked up the key and was examining it. “I suppose,” I said,
“it’s the key to something.”
“That’s right,” chimed in Hattie May with a fresh accession of hope.
“Nobody would take the trouble to bury a key unless it was to something
pretty important. Maybe to the box that holds the treasure or—or to a
locked room—or something. I’ll bet that’s it—the treasure’s hidden in
the house!”
“I don’t think there are any locked rooms in the house,” remarked Eve.
“Sandy and I went over it pretty thoroughly that first day and we
didn’t find any.”
“But there must be something!” Hattie May turned and strode toward the
back door.
“Well I’ve got to be getting on,” Michael said. “I wish you luck with
your blue emerald!”
“Michael Gilpatrick,” Hattie May turned about and faced him, “I don’t
believe you’d take the trouble to pick up that treasure if it was right
before your eyes! All you care about is cows and—and crops and plowing
and grubby things like that!”
Michael’s ringing laugh answered her as he strode away. “You can’t
really blame him,” said Eve, “for not being so awfully keen about this
when he’s got that other thing hanging over him! I’d be worried too.”
Hattie May and Hamish had disappeared inside the house but they were
back in five minutes. “Every door in the place is wide open,” Hattie
May declared in disgust, “and the key doesn’t fit a single lock.”
“Well I think the best thing for us to do now is to go home,” I said.
Somewhat to my surprise Hamish agreed with my suggestion at once. I had
not expected him to give up the search so easily.
Our own orderly garden was cool and refreshing that night after the
sticky heat of the day. We joined Aunt Cal and Adam there after we had
finished the dishes. Under cover of the darkness I took my courage in
my hands. “Aunt Cal,” I asked, “did you ever hear that Captain Judd
Craven had—well anything valuable hidden away? Any—well any treasure
or anything?”
At the word “treasure” I could fairly feel Aunt Cal beside me stiffen.
“Treasure!” she ejaculated scornfully. “What has put such an idea into
your head?”
“Well that paper we found, in the first place,” I returned, “the one
with the measurements on it, you know. And then this afternoon we dug
up an old key out there in the garden at Craven House. It was in a
tobacco tin just as if someone had hidden it on purpose.”
Aunt Cal made a noise that sounded like “pish!” “So that’s what you’ve
been up to,” she said caustically. “I must confess that I’m
considerably surprised that girls of your age and upbringing should
find nothing better to do with your time! Buried treasure indeed!”
“But you see, Aunt Cal,” Eve came to my defense, “it did seem as if
those directions must mean something, especially after that fellow,
that Mr. Bangs, wanted them so badly that he came to the house here to
look for them. So then this morning when Hamish found the missing
statue of Circe down that old well and this afternoon when Sandy
discovered where she used to stand, why we just had to find out what
there was to it, don’t you see? And then when we dug up the key, why we
just naturally couldn’t help wondering what it was the key of.”
Aunt Cal shook her head sadly. “I knew a man who wasted the best years
of his life in the search for treasure!” she said.
“You mean Captain Craven’s son?” I asked timidly, my heart beginning to
beat a little faster for I felt that I was on delicate ground.
She nodded solemnly. “Carter Craven went to the South Seas on a hunt
for buried gold when he was eighteen. It wrecked his life and broke his
father’s heart!”
“Oh!” I had never heard Aunt Cal speak like that before!
“He—he didn’t find anything?” Eve asked slowly.
I could feel the flash in Aunt Cal’s eyes though I could not see it.
“Of course he didn’t. He was the victim of a pack of adventurers! He
was gone six years. And when he came back,” her voice broke, “he was
like an old man! So—so changed!”
“Oh, Aunt Cal, how terrible!” I cried. “What did it?”
“His health was ruined for one thing—the life he’d led, the climate,
the companionships. And what was worse, his moral fibre was gone! He
had no desire to work, to settle down to earn an honest living. His
head was full of schemes, get-rich-quick schemes. He drifted from one
to another. Nothing that he undertook ever amounted to anything.” She
broke off suddenly and her voice softened ever so little. “I am telling
you all this,” she added, “so that you may understand what the lure of
gold can do to a human being.”
We were silent for a long time after she had finished speaking. If the
truth be told I was feeling rather small. Also I was experiencing a new
understanding of Aunt Cal. For the first time I had had a glimpse of
the real person behind the mask of severity she habitually wore. It was
Eve who finally ventured to put one more question. “And Carter Craven,”
she asked, “when he went away the last time, was it for something like
that?”
“I believe so,” Aunt Cal returned shortly. “I was told it was a gold
mine, though I was not here at the time.”
“And no one has heard of him since?”
She nodded. “I went into Millport yesterday to see the lawyer who has
charge of the estate, to tell him about this man Bangs. I feel that if
we could get hold of him, he might be able to tell us something. But
now that he is wanted by the police, no doubt he will have left the
neighborhood for good.” She sighed.
I sighed too. “I do wish they could find him before Wednesday,” I said.
“Then perhaps the police would believe Michael’s story. If they
don’t——” I broke off, conscious that Aunt Cal was not listening. She
seemed utterly absorbed in her own thoughts.
Didn’t she care, I thought, that the good name of a perfectly innocent
boy was about to be dragged in the dust! As the minutes went by and
still she said nothing, all my newly aroused sympathy vanished. If she
was so indifferent to the troubles of others, she didn’t deserve
anybody’s sympathy. I grew so indignant, sitting there in the darkness,
that I finally could stand it no longer and said I guessed I’d go to
bed.
“All she cares about,” I sputtered five minutes, later as I pulled off
my shoes and flung them into the corner, “is that stuffy old house with
its messy old garden and its defunct fountain and—and all of its
moldly old memories!”
“You’re wrong, Sandy,” Eve said. “I think the thing she cares most
about is Carter—his memory, I mean. I don’t think she’ll ever be happy
till that is cleared.”
I stopped with one stocking half off and looked at Eve. “What in the
world makes you think that?” I inquired.
“Don’t you remember what Captain Trout hinted to us, that some people
thought Carter had destroyed his father’s will?”
“Oh,” I said, light beginning to dawn, “you think that is what’s eating
Aunt Cal?”
“I’m sure of it. It isn’t the house, it’s the thought that he would do
such a thing—don’t you see?”
“But didn’t she say he was just a rotter anyway?”
“Yes, but that was after he’d been away. Before perhaps he was
different. Perhaps she cared about him, Sandy. I don’t mean in a
sentimental way necessarily. But maybe she was fond of him—they were
cousins, you know. Perhaps they played together when they were
children, went to school together——And it’s worse to have people
you’re fond of, people you’ve trusted, let you down than anything,
isn’t it?”
“Yes, I see,” I said. I regarded Eve thoughtfully. It was not the first
time that she had astonished me by reading the motives and desires that
were shut up inside of people. Indeed as I thought about it, I found
this new view of Aunt Cal so interesting that Michael and his troubles
were, I’m ashamed to say, entirely forgotten for the time being.
As I lay and watched the sea breeze flutter the muslin curtain, my
imagination was busy with the girl who had been Aunt Cal and the boy
who had been Carter Craven. I played with the idea that there had been
a romance between them. As for my uncle, Tom Poole, well I just left
him out of the picture.
The morning, however, brought me back to reality. It was Tuesday.
Tomorrow Michael would have to go to court. And nothing at all was
being done about it!
“If I could just be there,” Eve said soberly, “I’m sure I could make
that old judge listen to reason!”
“Aunt Cal,” I said, “would pass on at the suggestion—a niece of hers
in a police court!”
“I suppose so!” Eve sighed.
The morning’s mail brought an envelope addressed to me. It was from
Millport, from the photographer where Hamish had taken my film to be
developed. I called to Aunt Cal to come and look as I spread out the
prints on the kitchen table.
“Look here we are in our bathing suits!” I said teasingly. For dear
Aunt Cal went bathing in the days when girls wore ample costumes with
full skirts trimmed with white braid and little puff sleeves and
collars buttoned around their precious throats. We had come upon the
picture of her in one in an old album, so I knew.
Aunt Cal took up the picture and scanned it stoically. But instead of
the comment of disapproval I had expected, she only said, “I see you
got the sail boats in too.”
“Yes, aren’t they pretty?”
She nodded. Then she said a funny thing. “Your young farmer friend
shows up pretty good.”
“Michael, yes that’s him on the end.”
“Um. Didn’t you say it was Saturday that this car he’s in trouble about
was stolen?” she continued still more unexpectedly.
“Yes,” I said, “Saturday afternoon about half past five. Why do you
ask, Aunt Cal?”
She turned back to the sink where she was cleaning beets for dinner.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve got this picture, haven’t you, with this boy
in it? And you took it Saturday afternoon. If he wants—what is it they
call it?—an alibi——”
“Yes of course,” I agreed. “But we can’t prove that it was taken
Saturday afternoon, don’t you see?”
“Oh, I say, but we can!” Eve fairly bounced out of her chair. “Oh,
Sandy, don’t you see?”