The Mystery of the Pilgrim Trading Post. Anne Molloy

      Feverishly they set to work. By the time Jo’s stitch had gone they were knee deep in a crater and had found neither Indian nor Pilgrim leavings.

      “How long would it take these Indians to eat all the clams or oysters or whatever was in the shells?” asked Lettie.

      “Years and years, I guess,” Jo answered. “They used to come every year to the same place. I’ve read all about it. They would eat some of the clams right there. The women would dry the rest in the sun or smoke them over a fire.”

      Jo joined them and, turn and turn about, they worked with the spade. They made a small mountain of freshly dug earth. But they found nothing.

      Finally Lettie sat down to rest. “I’m so hot and tired and thirsty that I could drink a well dry. Let’s go to Mary Pete’s drugstore and get a coke.”

      “Let’s,” said Jo, and drove the spade into the earth until it stood alone. “Whatever’s here in the heap will wait for us that long, I guess.” He led the race toward the drugstore.

      Mary Pete’s old shop was built in the manner of all such from Augusta to Abilene to Alaska. Its roof was flat and the false front hid it from the road. A huge mortar and pestle with only a trace of its original gilt stood at the peak. The faded sign over the door read, “Jonas Tibbets, Druggist.” Sign and building were both a weathered gray. In fact, the only brightness on the outside was furnished by two teardrop glass globes that hung in the windows on either side of the door. One globe was filled with red liquid, the other blue. Their reflected colors stained the ledge beneath them red and blue.

      The jingle of a bell hanging on the door told Mary Pete they had arrived. She parted a pair of curtains at the back of the shop and joined them.

      “I’ll warrant you’ve come to ask me a question,” was her greeting. “I left in such a hurry that I forgot to tell you which room is the haunted one. Don’t worry it’s mine and I’ve never seen our ghost. Those that have report a lady with a red shawl over her head who climbs the front stairs laboriously at night and then opens a drawer in my bureau. I’ve never had the luck to meet her.”

      “Poor ghost,” said Lettie with a delighted shiver, and her imagination went dancing off until she forgot why they were here.

      Jo remembered. “That’s not really what we came for,” he told his cousin. “We wanted to tell you we’d found a shell heap and we’ve been digging in it so hard we’ve got to have a cold drink.”

      While he spoke his eyes, like those of the other two, studied the store. The soda fountain they expected was not here. Neither were there postcard racks, magazine stands, sunglasses, or bathing caps.

      Mary Pete read their puzzled expressions. She laughed. “I can see you don’t know what to make of my drugstore. That’s what it is, a drugstore, pure and simple. Nary an ice-cream soda or candy bar in the place. But let’s see now.” She turned to the shelf behind her. “Yes, here they are. This is what passed for candy in the old days. I still carry them because I like them—colt’s-foot rock and horehound drops. Help yourselves.”

      She set two glass jars down on the counter and took off their wide stoppers.

      Horehound drops were the choice of all three, perhaps because they looked more like candy than the other. The fluted, pencil-thin sticks of colt’s-foot rock were like pillars in a set of building blocks.

      “H-m, good,” said Lettie as she tasted the pleasant sweetness of her drop. “What lovely bottles you have all 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.