it with
sand until it shone.

"Just see him gloat," laughed Teddy. "You'd think he was a pilgrim who
had just come across a precious relic."

"Or a miner who had found a diamond," added Ross.

"He's earned the right to gloat," maintained Fred. "If I'd driven home a
harpoon with such a sure hand and steady aim as his, I'd be so proud
that my hat wouldn't fit me."

"I'm thinking as much of dad as I am of myself," grinned Lester. "He'll
be tickled to death when he hears that I've speared a shark with that
old harpoon of his. He's always thought a lot of it, but he'll think
still more of it now."

"Well, now that the harpoon is out, let's turn this fellow on his back.
I want to have a good look at that mouth of his," remarked Fred.

It was quite an undertaking, but by distributing themselves along the
body, using their implements as levers and all heaving at a given
signal, they finally succeeded.

It was a frightful mouth, armed with huge rows of sawlike teeth, and
although they knew the brute was dead the boys could not repress a
shudder as they looked at it.

"Talk about a buzz saw!" exclaimed Teddy. "It couldn't cut you in two
more neatly than this fellow could when he was swimming around."

"If those teeth could talk, I imagine they'd have some stories to tell,"
added Ross.

"And they wouldn't be pretty stories either," observed Bill.

"I wouldn't want him to be the undertaker at my funeral," said Fred, who
could not help thinking that that dismal function might have been
performed by this shark or some other the day he had gone overboard.

"Look at those wicked eyes," said Lester. "They're almost as fiendish
now as they were when they looked up at us as he came swimming around
the boat. I'll wager we'll see them more than once in our dreams."

"As long as we don't see them any other way it won't matter much,"
concluded Bill, the practical.

It was a full hour before the boys had cut the teeth from the bony
sockets and had secured all the strips of hide they wanted to make up
into souvenirs.

"We'll leave the rest of the carcass here until the tide comes in and
carries it away," remarked Lester, when the work was finished. "It'll
float out to sea and the other fish will make short work of it."

"That'll be only justice," said Teddy. "He's feasted on them or their
brothers by the ton in his time."

"The gulls will help them out," said Lester, as he pointed to a number
of the great birds circling ar