Mart scowled down at the sand. For the moment she was possessed with an envy for Sidney's agile imagination, a disgust at her own stolid faculties. Why couldn't _she_ think of things right offhand the way Sidney could? But it was Lavender who suggested the "signal." "Hook!" he offered and Sidney clapped her hands in delight. "Oh, grand! No one would ever guess. And it sounds so shivery! Why, that man with the iron hook just _has_ to be a pirate!" Then she suddenly grew embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. "It's different with you two," she explained, "you've lived here all your lives and you don't know what it's like to have to be a po--" She broke off, startled. One breath more and she would have revealed the truth to Lavender and Mart. "Middletown is the pokiest town--there's nothing exciting ever happens there." "I don't know as much exciting happens here. I s'pose enough happens, only you have to have something inside you that makes you _think_ it exciting, I guess." Which was Mart's initial step into any analysis of emotion, but not her last. Lavender turned toward the wharf. "I got to go and hunt up Cap'n Hawkes," he announced regretfully. "So it'll be 'hook,' will it? Well, I swear from henceforth I'll watch every citizen of Provincetown to see if he has a cutlass at his belt or a tattoo on his chest. Come on, girls--sleuths, I mean--" "I do hope," sighed Sidney as she and Mart wandered homeward over the hard sand, "that one of us'll have to say 'hook' soon. Don't you?" But in her heart Sidney had an annoying conviction that neither Mart nor Lav took her pirate suspicions quite as seriously as she did. At supper Lav deliberately kept the conversation on Jed Starrow and his activities with a disconcerting twinkle in his eyes. Mart assumed the same lofty tolerance of their secret game as she showed to their play on the _Arabella_--as though it were a sort of second-best fun. "Well, I don't care," Sidney declared stoutly. To think of Jed Starrow as a wicked buccaneer and Joe Josephs, the wrecker, as his accomplice in piracy, satisfied her craving for adventure. For the next many days she let it color everything she saw, every word she overheard; the connecting links she forged from her own active imagination. CHAPTER XIV WORDS THAT SING To seal their pact of palship Lavender took Sidney to Top Notch.