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 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." "Old Trimmer owned the land," Pee-wee fairly yelled, "but now the land isn't there any more and now it's an island so he doesn't own it because he's got a deed and it doesn't say _island_ on the deed! _Gee whiz_, anybody knows that." "But suppose the owner of the scow wants his property," Townsend said. "Let him come and get it," Pee-wee shouted. "If we get a deed for this island the scow is covered by the deed!" "You mean it's covered by the island," Brownie said. "Well, we seem to be standing still now, anyway," said Townsend; "it's a relief to know that when we wake up to-morrow morning we won't be floating in the water. Who's got a match? Let's start a fire and begin moving toward the hunter's stew." "We don't need matches," Pee-wee said with a condescending sneer. "Do you think scouts use matches? They light fires by rubbing sticks. Matches are civilized." Whereupon Pee-wee gave a demonstration of not getting a light by the approved old Indian fashion of rubbing sticks and striking sparks from stones and so on.