The Golden Eagle Mystery (20 page)

Harvey Bohnett’s fist swung at Bonehead savagely. “Shut up!” he yelled. “It wasn’t me that lighted it, it was Patina!”

The Coast Guard crew laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. Holding his sides, the officer at last managed to stop laughing and to command silence.

“That’s enough!” he gasped. “Take these three pirates over to the station and have ’em locked up! They’re as guilty as goldfish, by their own confession. Then bring Captain Reckless’ yacht back here with you, and don’t tow her too fast, or you’re apt to strain her planking. Take it easy, and by that time we ought to be able to get that boat out of the cove. I’ll wait here with the boys till you get back. I want to hear more about this. I haven’t had so much fun since the night before Christmas!”

When Mr. Patina and the Bohnett brothers, still shaking their fists at each other, had been marched on board the launch and taken away, Billy and Djuna and the bos’n’s mate strolled up to the tumble-down shack together.

“Say, tell me one thing, Admiral,” the officer said to Djuna as they walked along, “did you really find a lantern on board the
Patagonia?
Were there really finger marks on it?”

“Why, of course,” said Djuna. “It’s hanging up in Aunt Patty’s woodshed. But I didn’t say there were finger marks on it. I just said you
can
make fingerprints on smoked glass, and that’s true. Billy made a lot of them, and that’s what made me think of it.”

“And there really were some on the lantern chimney?” persisted the bos’n’s mate.

“How could there be?” exclaimed Djuna, in surprise. “The chimney couldn’t get smoke on the outside, it was just on the inside. But I was pretty sure they wouldn’t think of that.”

“No,” said the bos’n’s mate, looking at Djuna with new respect, “they wouldn’t think of that. But what made
you
think of it?”

Djuna looked embarrassed.

“I wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t been for Billy,” he said. “Billy didn’t have a dog, so he could name him Alberto, he just
had
to have one! So he made him up. And we just
had
to have some fingerprints. You can do almost anything when you have to, I guess. Alberto can.”

“And besides,” he added thoughtfully, “I was pretty sure Bonehead wouldn’t notice. He sits down on chairs when they aren’t there.”

O
N THE
doorstep of the shack, Djuna picked up the slingshot that he had got Bonehead to make for him.

“This old thing worked all right, didn’t it, Billy?” he said proudly. “It must have, or you wouldn’t have gone for help. How close did that clam shell come to you?”

“Gee, it scared the life out of me!” said Billy. “I was just sitting there, wondering why you didn’t come back, when, all of a sudden,
wham!
it came right down
kaplunk
in the bottom of the boat and bounced right out again! It had just started to sink when I grabbed it. As soon as I opened it up and found that message in it, I snuck out of there just as fast as I could. Say, where did you get that piece of paper, anyway?”

Djuna looked around on the floor by the fireplace and found the two scraps of paper he had torn out of the old almanac.

“Here,” he said, “let me have that piece you’ve got there. It fits in between these other two pieces, like this.” The three pieces, put together, read like this:

“Don’t come, get help quick!” muttered the bos’n’s mate, reading the middle words downward. “Oh, boy, oh, boy! And you mailed it in a clam shell!”

“Well, I didn’t have any postage stamp,” said Djuna, giggling, “and, besides, if I’d mailed it with a stamp, Billy wouldn’t have got it till the next day.”

Billy and the Coast Guard officer laughed, but Billy kept looking around the empty cabin, searching for something. Djuna watched him with a mischievous smile on his face.

“What are you looking for, Billy?” he asked innocently. “The treasure, of course!” exclaimed Billy. “Didn’t you find it?”

The Coast Guard officer looked startled. “Hey, what did you say?” he exclaimed. “Treasure?
What
treasure?”

The boys looked from one to another. Djuna nodded.

“I guess I’d better begin at the beginning,” he said.

He led the way outdoors, and they sat down in the shade of the old lilac bushes.

“The way it began,” said Djuna, “was really when I was in Edenboro. I live at Miss Annie Ellery’s house in Edenboro, all winter. This summer, Miss Annie got a letter from Aunt Patty Tubbs. Aunt Patty said in the letter that she was in trouble, and she wished she had somebody to stay with her. So Miss Annie sent me to live here with Aunt Patty in Stony Harbor for a while, and she let me bring my dog, Champ, with me. Miss Annie told me to find out what sort of trouble Aunt Patty was in, if I could, but not to bother Aunt Patty with a lot of questions. And it’s turned out that it was lucky I brought Champ, too!

“Well, I talked to people who knew all about Aunt Patty, and they all said that she wasn’t in any trouble now, except she was poor. They all liked her and were sorry for her, but they didn’t like her husband, before he got killed, a long time ago. It was really Mr. Tubbs that was to blame because she was poor, but she always gets mad if anyone says so.

“Then, all of a sudden, the funniest things began to happen! The funny thing was that they were all mixed up with eagles and eggs! Champ found a stone egg, with spots on it, and an eagle’s claw holding it, up in the attic. Aunt Patty said it was an umbrella handle, but it wasn’t. I put it in my bureau drawer, and the next time I looked for it, it was gone. Billy and I found a piece of paper in the attic, and it said on it, ‘I have put the nest egg where it belongs.’ I thought that a nest egg was a china egg. I didn’t know it could mean money, too. I asked Aunt Patty if she ever had a nest egg, and she said no. You see, I was thinking about a china egg, and she thought I was talking about money.

“The same day that the stone egg was stolen, Aunt Patty’s wooden darning egg was stolen. It’s a hollow wooden egg, as light as a feather.

“Before that, Billy and I saw an eagle over there on Eagle Rock—a real, live eagle. All the feathers on its head and neck were white. That’s the kind of eagle that’s called a bald eagle. Billy and I went to see Doctor Holder, and he showed us a bald eagle’s egg. It’s white. It hasn’t got any spots on it at all.

“And then Aunt Patty’s boat, the
Patagonia
, got stolen. The funny thing about that was that those three fellows didn’t want the boat, and they didn’t want anything they found in it! They forgot what boats are for. Boats are for carrying things across water.

“Aunt Patty said they hadn’t stolen any money, because she never had any money to steal.”

The Coast Guard officer wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’ve heard of mysteries before,” he said, “but this has got them
all
beat!”

“Yes, sir,” said Djuna. “That’s what I thought, too. And after we found the letters, it was worse than ever.”

“Letters?” said the bos’n’s mate. “What letters?”

“We found them in the sea chest in the attic,” explained Djuna. “Aunt Patty’s great-grandfather wrote one of them, and her grandfather wrote one, and her father wrote one, and Mr. Tubbs wrote one. Two of them talked about eagles’ nests, and, of course, I thought they meant the nests the eagles used to build in the pine tree on Eagle Rock. The letters just got me mixed up worse than ever. I got Billy to bring me over here to hunt for the nest, and all we dug up was an old hollow bone cane that my dog found. Do you know what that cane was? No, wait, I’d better explain something else, first!

“I guess I just never would have found out about the treasure, if it hadn’t been for Billy’s cousin, Emmy. She’s got a book, with pictures of coins in it. As soon as I saw it, I went home and read those old letters again, and then I went to the Public Library and got the lady there to help me, and all the pieces began to fit into each other, just like a jigsaw puzzle!

“Aunt Patty’s great-grandfather was the captain of a whaleship. He landed on the coast south of Patagonia. He traded with the Indians there, and got some sort of heavy sand from them, about a pound of it. I found out at the Library what it was. It was gold dust!
*
He got back to Philadelphia with it. He took it to the Mint.
**
The Mint is the place where they make coins. They told him it was worth three hundred dollars. His wife was thirty years old,
***
so with the three hundred dollars he bought thirty gold coins, worth ten dollars apiece, from the Mint, brought them home to his wife, and asked her to keep them for a nest egg.

“That was all in the first letter, the one Captain Benjamin Greene wrote. At the bottom of that letter, his son, Captain Hiram Greene, wrote sixty-three years later that the gift was still guarded, and that he had increased it ten times. That meant that he was saving three hundred and thirty gold coins, worth ten dollars apiece, for the nest egg.”

The bos’n’s mate sat up straight. “Zowie!” he exclaimed. “Three thousand, three hundred dollars! That ain’t hay!”

Djuna nodded. “No, sir,” he said. “But Aunt Patty had told me that she never had had a nest egg. If there was any money, she didn’t know where it was. Maybe it had all been spent. Captain Atterbury told me that Aunt Patty’s father spent all his money, and didn’t leave any to Aunt Patty.

“Then I read the next letter. Captain Hiram Greene wrote it. It was about something he had given his little boy, Amos. Well, I guessed right away what that was, because Doctor Holder showed us a great big spotted egg that he said Amos Greene gave him. The letter said that Captain Greene bought it from a miner who got it in the mountains in California. So that was another thing I asked about at the Public Library, and the lady showed me a book about birds, and it said that the kind of eagle that lives in the high mountains in California is the golden eagle, and it has spotted eggs!

“Yes, sir, a golden eagle! It’s bigger than the one we saw, the one that nests here! It has dark brown feathers, almost black, but the old ones have feathers that look like gold, at the back of their heads!

“But, listen! Did you know that a ten-dollar gold-piece is called an eagle?
I
never knew that, till I saw that book of Emmy’s!

“So that made me think of something else in that letter. That’s just what that spotted stone looked like, the golden eagle’s egg, with the eagle’s claw holding it. And after we found that hollow cane, I was sure that the stone egg was made for the handle of the cane. I measured the hollow part of the cane. It was wide enough and deep enough to hold
thirty
gold eagles!

“But where did Captain Greene keep the
three hundred
gold eagles? I kept saying to myself, ‘They were a nest egg, a nest egg, he wanted them to hatch into
more.’
And all of a sudden I remembered a little box that Aunt Patty keeps her sewing things in. It’s got a cover, and it says on the cover, ‘Hatch & Hatch.’ Aunt Patty said it had belonged to her mother, or maybe to her grandmother, and they always had kept spools in it. It had a velvet lining. The velvet was dented, pressed down in little circles. Aunt Patty said the spools made the dents. I didn’t see how they could, I didn’t think spools of thread would be heavy enough. But a stack of ten gold eagles would be about the same size as a spool, and it would be much heavier. I measured inside the box. There was room enough there for three hundred and twenty gold eagles!

“But that wasn’t any use. They weren’t there! It wasn’t even any use asking Aunt Patty, because she had never even heard of them.

“The only thing that I was sure of was that they had kept the gold eagles in the cane, when they had only thirty of them. But, after Captain Greene got three hundred more, they had to put them in the spool box, most of them, anyway. But that still left about a dozen that they kept in the cane, until Mr. Tubbs got a bigger box and took them, too, and threw the stick away after he came to the island. As soon as I get the top of the cane back, I’m going to put it on the stick and give it to Captain Atterbury, because he said he would like to have it.

“By that time, I had figured out where the eagles had been kept, at first, but I still didn’t know what had become of them, after they had been taken out of the cane and out of the spool box. I had to study the letters some more.

“There was one letter that Aunt Patty’s father had written. All it said was, ‘The eagles nest in stony harbor and what came from Patagonia must go to Patagonia.’ I got to thinking about it. The more I thought about it, the more I thought there was something queer about it. There never was any eagles’ nest in Stony Harbor, in the village—the only one was out here on Haypenny Island, and that’s three miles from Stony Harbor. Aunt Patty’s father didn’t mean they nested in a village. He meant the nest was in a harbor of stone. ‘What came from Patagonia’ meant the gold. When he said it had to go to Patagonia, he meant that it had to go to Aunt Patty, because that’s her name.

“Gee, I was getting pretty excited, then, because that meant that he
hadn’t
spent all the money, the way people said he had, but was keeping it for a nest egg for Aunt Patty, when she grew up. Where had he hid it? What was a harbor of stone?

“I asked the lady at the Public Library if there are any kind of nests that aren’t birds’ nests. She looked in a great big book, a dictionary, I guess, and she said any snug, cozy sort of place is called a nest, and a place to put things is called a nest. So then I tried to remember what Captain Atterbury told me about Aunt Patty’s father, and I remembered he said he used to sit by the stone fireplace and tap his cane on the floor and say, ‘All I’ve got left is right here!’ A fireplace—gee, that’s the cosiest place in a house! And it was stone, Captain Atterbury said. A stone place, where you put things!