akes no sense,
Hobart. Why would anyone weight a freshly killed chicken and throw it
over the side?"

"No reason at all," the big scientist said, "unless he wanted to create
mischief below."

"But just the act of dropping a chicken wouldn't ensure harm to divers
below," Tony objected.

"That's why I said mischief. Inexperienced divers might panic under such
circumstances and attract the sharks to themselves."

Rick hazarded a guess. "What if they just wanted to keep people from
diving in the area?"

"That might be one way of doing it." Zircon said thoughtfully. "Are you
suggesting that there are others after the _Maiden Hand_ treasure?"

Scotty spoke up. "How could anyone else find out about the treasure?"

"It's possible that there are other references besides the logbook we
found," Tony replied. "But it would be too farfetched to speculate that
other treasure hunters had found the location and were diving right at
this time."

"This might be related to what happened on St. Thomas," Rick ventured.

Zircon shook his massive head. "Extremely unlikely. Consider." He ticked
off the points on his fingers. "Who knew we were coming to Clipper Cay?
Ernst, Steve, and his Navy friend. We did not mention it to the people
from whom we bought supplies, nor did we discuss it in the presence of
others. We were not followed here. No, Rick, I think that we cannot
blame this incident on the ones in St. Thomas."

"Then it was a dangerous practical joke," Tony concluded. "Unless there
was some legitimate reason for throwing the chicken over that we don't
know about."

Zircon steered the _Water Witch_ through the reef entrance, and the
Spindrifters tied up at the dock. Rick and Scotty inspected the
compressor and then measured the amount of air in the tanks. They hooked
the tanks up, refilled the gas tank of the compressor engine, and left
the tanks to fill while they went to the cottage.

Rick and Zircon prepared dinner while Tony and Scotty refilled the
gasoline lanterns that provided light, and generally straightened up the
cottage.

Rick called, "Tony, tell us more about this Indian stuff you found."

Scotty added, "And what's a midden, anyway?"

Tony leaned on his broom. "A midden is a polite name for a refuse heap.
Before the days of rubbish collection, people used to dump their trash
in the yard. The Indians did, and thereby provided archaeologists with
an important source of information. Apparently a tribe lived