asked him if he had an extra chart of that part of the coast, and Mr. Browning said he had an old one we could have. Well, Catty and I took that chart and studied over it, and picked out a place a long way off. We thought it would be a good idea to send them sailing as far as we could get them to go handily. The island we picked was Nantucket, because that looked like it was about as far as sounded reasonable, and then we went to work.

We studied over the map of the island, and figured out where we would bury treasure if we were pirates. The island is shaped kind of like a long claw. There’s a channel into a harbor right at the town of Nantucket where the old whalers used to sail from, and the harbor looks like it stretched quite a ways back from the town, and almost through to the ocean on the other side.

“I’ll bet there weren’t many people living there when the pirates were doing business,” says Catty. “The pirates would use that harbor, because it’s sheltered, and they could go in and out without being seen. Most likely they would have hid their treasure some place where they could get to it in any weather, so it wouldn’t have been on the open coast. It would be some place where they could row to it in a small boat. So the likeliest place is off at the far end of that basin somewheres. It looks on the chart as if it was all low and sandy. There’s a good spot back there,” he says, pointing with a pencil.

“Good enough,” says I, “let’s bury our treasure there.”

So we did. We didn’t try to make believe we had an old map, but just a copy of one on a modern chart. As careful as we could we measured off on the chart by the scale of miles, and made a cross in ink. Then we wrote, or printed rather, down at the bottom of the chart. What we printed was:

“Intersection of lines drawn N. by E. from Steamship Dock, and S. by S. E. from light on tip of claw. Fifty feet from highwater mark. Six feet down.”

“There,” says Catty, “that looks interesting, eh?”

“You bet,” says I, “but now what do we do with it?”

“That,” says he, “is for us to find out.”

A little while afterward Mr. Browning said he was going ashore to telephone, and asked if we didn’t want to go along, which we did. We used the little dinghy, and hauled her up on the club float. Then we walked up the dock to the clubhouse, and the steward met us and made us welcome. Mr. 

 Prev. P 22/125 next