But if the squire’s attention was drawn to Mr. Carleton in the act of reading the letter, it was certainly doubled and trebled when the latter, having finished his perusal of it, waved the letter in a seemingly triumphant manner about his head and then tore it into many little pieces and dropped the pieces at his feet. Squire Brackett, through the spy-glass, watched Mr. Carleton come down through the fields toward the village. He knew the exact spot to the inch where Mr. Carleton had stood. It was at the bars that divided a pasture belonging to the postmaster and a piece of town property. The squire shut the sliding glass windows that protected his lookout, hurried out-of-doors, walked briskly up through the fields, making a detour to avoid meeting Mr. Carleton, and arrived, somewhat short of breath, at the bars. He gathered up the pieces of the letter carefully. He put them into his coat-pocket, and walked briskly back to his house. He hadn’t got them all, for the wind had carried some away. But the letter had evidently been a brief one. When the squire took the pieces out that afternoon at his desk in a little room that he called his office, there were only eleven scraps that he could assemble. Mr. Carleton had torn the letter into small bits. The squire was disappointed. He had hoped to gratify his curiosity and be able to pry into Mr. Carleton’s private affairs a little. And withal, there were two words that interested him greatly and made his disappointment all the more keen. These were two words that followed, one the other, in the sequence in which they had been written. They were the words, “aboard yacht.” All the others had been so separated in the destruction of the letter that the squire despaired of ever being able to make anything out of them, or to restore them to anything like their original consecutive form. However, he arranged the words and scraps of words by pasting them on a sheet of paper, as follows: lock ey must be sound mbers aboard yacht starboa still under ays third “Well, there’s a puzzle for you!” he exclaimed, dubiously. “How in the world shall I ever be able to make anything out of that?” But the next moment he gave a chuckle of exultation. “I’ve got part of it already!” he cried. “Lucky I happened to set them down just this way. Those letters, ‘mbers’ must have been part of the word ‘timbers.’ So that, after the first three scraps that I have put down, it reads, ‘sound timbers aboard yacht.’ I’ll get something out of this yet. There’s ‘starboa,’ too. That’s ‘starboard,’ of course. And ‘ays’ below may be ‘stays.’ That might make ‘starboard stays.’” A look of perplexity came over the squire’s face the next moment.