CHAPTER X.

WHAT PERCE FOUND ON THE BEACH.

The boys worked well while they talked; and often the cart went with its shaggy and dripping load to the two piles of seaweed they were depositing high on the shore.

“Have you thought, boys,” said Perce, as he backed the cart around, after one of these short trips; “it’s just along here somewhere that the body of the old lobsterman came ashore, after the gale three years ago?”

All stopped to look at the tumbling breakers, still casting up their burden of kelp.

“The storm caught him when he was out,” continued Perce; “but nobody ever knew whether he got capsized pulling his lobster-pots, or trying to land afterward. His boat was found stove to pieces on the rocks the next morning, but he wasn’t found for several days. Then, wasn’t it dreadful? Two men discovered him, when they were loading kelp!”

The boys worked for some time in silence, and then the conversation turned upon wrecks and accidents at sea, until the cart-box was once more filled with its heaping load.

This time the twins went with the oxen to dump it, while Perce stood leaning on his fork, looking down at the last marks of the receding tide, left in wavy lines along the sand.

Where some jags of seaweed had just been thrown up, these lines disappeared, giving place to little straight channels cut by the water dripping from them and running back to catch the retreating waves. He was curiously watching these effects, and throwing up some straggling stems of kelp with his fork, when he stopped suddenly with a start of surprise. Something brighter than the glistening golden-green leaves and stems had caught his eye. It was in the midst of a heap which had hardly yet landed, and which seemed ready to slide back into the sea with the next wave. He thrust in his fork to hold it; and, stooping, saw that the object was a bit of shining metal.

“Gold!” he exclaimed gleefully.

He took hold of it, but found that it did not come so easily out of the mingled mass of kelp and rockweed as he had anticipated. He pinched it firmly, pushing back some clustering pods of rockweed, and gave it a gentle pull.

“A gold chain!” he exclaimed in the greatest astonishment.

He had at first seen and touched only the end of the chain. But now he drew and drew, removing the soft, slimy incumbrance with his other hand, when up came, dangling before his eyes in the sun, a beautiful gold watch.

Perce Bucklin’s first impulse was to shout to his companions and hold up the prize for them to see; but that natural movement was checked by a more selfish consideration.

He was too honest a boy to wish to possess anything that did not truly belong to him. But suppose the owner of the watch should never appear? It might have been lost at sea, in the late storm; or possibly, before that, it slipped from the pocket of some voyager on yacht or ship, who would never pass that way again. Indeed, it might have been dropped overboard miles from that spot, and have been brought ashore by the kelp in which the chain was entangled.

If unclaimed, who would have a better right to it than the finder? But then Perce remembered the unlucky agreement by which everything they found that day on the beach was to be divided between him and the twins. To be sure, that was meant to apply principally to seaweed and driftwood; of course, it didn’t include watches! That seemed very plain to Percival Bucklin. Yet, the twins might think different. It would be absurd, but who could tell what self-interest might impel them to do?

It was this fear that prompted Perce to resolve upon a very foolish thing. He glanced around, and seeing that the twins had just dumped their load, and were lifting the cart-box back into its place, having quite too much to attend to at the moment to be observing him, he slipped watch and chain into his trousers-pocket. It had a hunter’s case, which, if it had so far kept it from being broken, would probably preserve it still.

“I won’t tell them,” he said to himself, “till I’ve had a little time to think.”

He was much excited; and if the twins had had keen eyes for anything that wasn’t lying on the beach, they must have noticed, when they returned, that something had happened to him in their absence.

He fell to pitching kelp again, but his talk was fitful and absent-minded. He was all the while thinking of what he had found, and instinctively looking for more watches and other valuables in the seaweed.

He also thought of something he wouldn’t have liked so well to find. The loser of the watch might have lost himself with it; and perhaps he, too, like the old lobsterman, had come ashore in a shroud of kelp.