right word.
“Challenging?”
“That’s it!”
Mr. Blake nodded. “You’ll find that owning an island will be quite a responsibility. But I don’t believe it will prove too big for you.” He turned from the gratitude in his son’s face and called toward the kitchen. “Ellen! Remind me to see Lawyer Perry tomorrow. We’re making over the deed to Blake’s Island to one David Blake.”
Mrs. Blake returned with hot coffee. She had a tender smile for her husband. “John, what a lovely way to settle things. I didn’t want to sell Blake’s.”
“Neither did I,” John Blake declared, and all four laughed with relief.
“If Mr. McNeill wants an island so bad,” Sally put in ungrammatically, “Uncle Charlie says he’ll sell Little Fox or Blueberry for a wooden nickel.”
“What makes you think the treasure isn’t on Little Fox or Blueberry?” David asked.
“Perhaps we can tell something from that old chart you found,” said Mr. Blake. “Let’s have a look at it.”
“I held it on my lap all the way in,” Sally began. Then she broke off and her eyes went blank.
“Uh-huh,” said David, exasperated. “You left it in Uncle Charlie’s gear shed.”
But Sally’s hand had gone to her mouth in horror. “I had it on my lap. I kept it safe on my lap all the way in to the cove.” Stricken, she turned to her brother. “Oh, David,” she wailed. “I never once had it in the shed. When you yelled, ‘Hold on’ when that Roddie McNeill headed into us, it must have been then . . . .”
David stared at her in disbelief. “Do you mean to say you lost that chart overboard?”
Sally, unable to answer, bit her lip and nodded.
David rose to his feet and pushed back his chair roughly. Anger darkened his face, and scorn for Sally tightened his voice. “I turn up the first clue to the treasure that this family’s ever had, and you go lose it overboard like a ninny. It serves me right. That’s what I get for trusting a girl. If it had been Poke, this wouldn’t have happened.”
A painful lump filled Sally’s throat and the world swam in a sea of shame.
“I’m off to see Poke,” David told his parents shortly.
Without looking again at Sally, or seeing the misery in her face, he slammed the door behind him.
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