He lifted up some grassy soil that drooped and hung in the
water, and tore it away. As he did so there was revealed a ridge of
heavy wood over which it had hung. By the same process he exposed a
yard or two of this black mud-covered edge.
"Well--I'll--be--_jiggered_!" said Billy.
"It's a scow or something!" said Brownie, almost too astonished to
speak.
"The island seems to overlap it sort of like a pie-crust," drawled
Townsend.
"The scow is the undercrust!" shouted Pee-wee, delighted with this
comparison to his favorite edible. "We'll call it Apple-pie Island and
it can't corrode or erode or whatever you call it, either, because it's
boxed in!"
That indeed seemed to be the way of it. Apparently the island reposed
comfortably in and over the edges of a huge, shallow box of heavy
timbers which had received it with kindly hospitality when it broke
away and toppled over into the water. As we know, the river had eaten
away the land under the little balcony peninsula, and the scow, or
whatever it was, must have drifted or been moored underneath the earthy
projection.
"Maybe it belonged to that big dredge that was working up here," said
Pee-wee, "Anyway it's lucky for us, hey? Because now our island has a
good foundation and it can't dis--what d'you call it."
"Only it complicates the question of ownership," said Townsend,
apparently not in the least astonished or excited. "Here is a piece of
land belonging to old Trimmer on a scow or something or other belonging
to a dredging company or somebody or other and claimed by the boy
scouts by right of discovery.
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