If any one had put that claw in there for him to find, why, of course, they would look for it when the _Viking_ was returned. It was bad enough to be cheated, defrauded, robbed—thought the squire. But to know that Henry Burns and Jack Harvey and all the rest of the scamps would look for that drawer, and find it missing, and laugh themselves sick to think of his discomfiture, why, that was not to be thought of. Squire Brackett stooped down and gathered up the pieces of the shattered drawer. Fortunately, they were of common pine, and were mostly wrenched apart where they had been nailed together. The squire hunted for hammer and nails in the yachtsmen’s stores, and hammered the drawer together as best it would go. He cast loose the line astern and pushed the yacht in to the pier again. Then he hunted around, outside of a boat-shop near by, till he found, a small piece of wood that would do, with proper shaping, to supply one of the parts he had broken. Altogether, with his clumsiness in the matter of reconstruction, the squire consumed the rest of the morning repairing the drawer he had wrecked. Then, when he had finished his work, he strode away up the street and made a purchase. The purchase was a fine, big boiled lobster—just a shade redder than the squire’s face as he paid for it. But, having paid for it, he took it back to the yacht and ate it for his dinner—all but one claw. That claw he wished to save. He was so careful of it, indeed, that he put it away in a certain secret drawer under the third locker on the starboard side. “No, they’re not coming,” he said, that evening, to John Hart and Ed Sanders, on their return. “Too bad. Got a telegram saying they can’t come. The sailing party’s given up. Shame, isn’t it? However, I’ve got some business I’m going to attend to before I go home. We’ll stay the week out. Your pay goes on just the same. So you needn’t say anything to the boys about my not using their yacht. They might think they got a shade the best of me. It’s all right, though. I can make use of the time.” The squire, in truth, was too ashamed to return so suddenly. He spent the week in Mayville; and of all miserable weeks in his existence, that week was the most dismal of any. Saturday came, and it was a day of fitful weather. Part of the day it rained. Then there were signs of clearing, with the wind sharp and squally from the west. They waited till mid-afternoon, and then the weather improving a little, the squire gave the order to start. He dreaded the sail, but he would wait no longer. They went across the bay under two reefs, and the squire’s hair stood on end all the way. It was shortly after supper, and Henry Burns and Jack Harvey sat with their friends, the Warren boys, on the veranda of the Warren cottage. The wind was still high, and now and then there came a brief rain-squall. “I wonder if the _Viking_ will be in,” said George Warren.