around your shop, Mary Pete.”
“Come in the next bad day and really look them over. I’ll give you a lesson in pharmacology to boot, if you’d like. But not right now; I’m working on a prescription for Hoyt Simpson’s wife. Then I’m going to send Ebbie along with it. At the same time, he’ll pick up the lobsters for our supper. That’s what I do, take out in trade what Hoyt owes me.” Then Mary Pete called into the back room, “Ebbie, is Hoyt’s boat in yet?”
A creak and the sound of a vacated chair rocking itself to a standstill came from the back room. “Ayuh, he be. Leastways he’s just coming in ’round the island,” Ebbie answered.
“In that case, I’ll hustle and get his prescription done for him. Then you can skedaddle over there and bring back our lobsters. I’ll warrant that by the time they’re ready to eat these three young ones will have found something interesting in the Indian shell heap.”
“Injuns,” was Ebbie’s scornful reply, but the word was all the cousins needed to make them want to resume their search.
Before Jo turned to go he said, “Maybe we ought to tell you what we did this morning, Mary Pete. We took one of your dories out of the boathouse and, well, we got ourselves adrift in her. That Bart Simes came out with his outboard and rescued us. He towed us in. I hope you don’t mind our letting him.”
“No. That was nice of Bart, I’m sure,” said Mary Pete with mild sarcasm. Then she exploded in a great sigh. “Oh, dear, what kind of guardian am I? I should have warned you about taking out any of my boats; they haven’t been in the water for a coon’s age. Maybe Ebbie will help you make one of the skiffs good and watertight.”
“Maybe.” Ebbie shrugged. “All of them boats leak like sieves, them that don’t leak like baskets, but if you say to fix up a skiff, Mary Pete, that’s what I’ll do.”
The three cousins went off to quench their thirst at the kitchen pump.
“I’m glad you told Mary Pete about our rescue, Jo,” said Lettie. “It was better for us to than for someone else.”
“That’s what I thought,” Jo answered.
“Yes,” Will agreed, “hearing it that way she might have ordered us to stay out of all boats. That would be no fun, even if we’re just here for a week.”
They returned to their digging. They widened the crater in the shell heap a great deal but they had nothing to show for their work except reddened palms and blisters from the spade.
“My back is broken. I’m hungry. I’m going to stop,” said Lettie.
“Great whirling dervishes, you don’t have to stay,” Jo scolded. “I thought you wanted to help save the Tibbetts place by turning up some evidence of a Pilgrim trading post. Go, if you want to. I’m staying. Maybe I’ll turn up something before supper. Go, but don’t forget to call me when the lobsters are ready.”
He attacked the shell heap with renewed energy. As Lettie crossed the pasture toward the house she was convinced that if the answer to the mystery of the Pilgrim trading post were there, Jo would find it. Either that or strike China with the spade.
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