And just then I remembered about something we had read in a scouts’ book about trees. Westy knows all the different kinds of wood; he’s crazy about trees. This is it, copied right out of the book: Cedar is the wood most valuable for the hulls of vessels. When kept under water its freshness is everlasting. While other woods rot away this soft, spongy wood that yields so readily to the ax or the jack-knife, defies the decaying effects of water, its soft fiber swelling and toughening even in ordinary dampness. Time is powerless to rot it when it is in its natural element. “What happened?” I asked him, because he seemed to know more about it than I did. He said, “That’s easy to see. The creek flooded the marsh last night. The solid part of the trestle that we noticed was just several old scows. I guess this was the only one made of cedar. Anyway, it rose with the water and broke the old tracks and floated away. It’s lucky the car wasn’t half on one scow and half on another.” “I’m always lucky, I am!” Pee-wee shouted. “I guess that’s because the dog was good and yellow,” I said. “If he had been orange color, goodness only knows what might have happened.” “Stick to this old car and you can’t go wrong,” Will Dawson said. “You said it,” I told him. “Now we can be pirates, hey?” the inventor said. “Sure,” I said. “You climb up and get inside the car. The first thing you know you’ll fall in the water, and the water around here is very wet.” “Didn’t I say stick to the car?” Pee-wee wanted to know. “Oh, you’re just the little hero,” I told him. “If we all get drowned we’ll have to thank you.” “_Drowned?_ What are you talking about?” he said. “If you’re afraid——” “Anybody that’s afraid can get out and walk,” I said. “We’ve got a private car and a private yacht too. We’re a rich patrol. I don’t think we’ll notice that crowd up at Temple Camp any more. We’ve got Submarine Sam looking like a mamma’s boy. A life on the ocean wave for us.” “We’re going sideways,” Westy said. “Frontways and sideways, what do we care?” I said. “Railroad travel is all right, but ocean travel for me,” Will said. “What are you kicking about?” Pee-wee yelled. “We’ve got both.” “If a stray airplane would only drop on us now we’d be happy,” I said. “You want too much,” Pee-wee shouted. “We can’t have _everything_.” CHAPTER XXXVI—THE OTHER ENDING Now if you want to know all about that, I mean what happened, you can find it in the Bridgeboro paper of the next day. Even newspaper reporters came from New York to find out about it. And they had articles and pictures and everything.