"Jab it down somewhere else," said Brownie.

Pee-wee moved the metal rod a yard or so distant and plunged it in the
ground again. There was the same hollow sound. For a moment they all
sat spellbound, mystified. Then, as if seized by a sudden thought,
Brownie hurried to the edge of the little island, exploring with his
hands. 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