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. CHAPTER XI. ANOTHER DISCOVERY. Perce’s eyes wandered up and down the beach, and finally, with thoughts of shipwreck, he stood leaning on his fork and gazed abstractedly out to sea. “What’s the matter with you?” cried Moke. “Why don’t you start up the team?” demanded Poke. “We’re waiting!” Perce left his fork sticking in the sand, and starting suddenly, with his face turned toward the sea, uttered an exclamation: “My gracious, boys! Look!” “Where? What?” cried the twins. “On the ‘Old Cow!’ There’s somebody there!” “That’s nothing strange,” Moke replied. “Some fisherman,” Poke added. They took the discovery coolly, not having Perce’s reason for attaching to it a tragical importance. “It’s no fisherman!” he exclaimed. “See! he is making some sort of signal!” And he added, in great excitement, “It’s somebody cast away on the rock! There’s been a wreck, boys! There’s been a wreck!”