This comforted Vi some, and she dried her tears.  Then Laddie made them all laugh by saying: 

“I have a new riddle!”

“Is it about a doll?” asked Rose.

“No.  It’s about a cow.”

“How can you make a riddle about a cow?” Russ demanded.

“Well, I didn’t make this one up,” said Laddie; “and it isn’t like the riddles I like to ask, ’cause there isn’t any answer to it.”

“There must be some answer,” declared Violet.  “All riddles have answers.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this one, and you can see if it has,” went on Laddie.  “Now listen, everybody.”

Then he slowly said: 

“How is it that a red cow can eat green grass and give white milk that makes yellow butter?”

No one answered for a moment, and then Daddy Bunker laughed.

“That is pretty good,” he said, “and I don’t believe there is any answer to it.  Of course we all know a red cow, or one that is a sort of brownish red, does eat green grass.  And the milk a cow gives is white and the butter made from the white milk is yellow.  Of course that isn’t exactly a riddle, but it’s pretty good, Laddie.”

“And is there an answer to it?” the little boy asked.

“I don’t believe there is,” answered his father.  “It’s just one of those things that happen.  Did you make that up, Laddie?”

“No.  Cousin Tom told it to me out of a book.  But I like it.”

Vi still sorrowed for her doll, and, in the days that followed, she often walked along the beach hoping “Sarah Janet,” as she called her, might be cast up by the tide or the waves.  Russ looked also, as did the others, but no doll was found.  Nor did Rose find her gold locket, though many holes were dug in the sand searching for it.

One morning, after breakfast, when he had gone down on the beach to watch the fishing boats come in, which he often did, Russ came running back to the house, very much excited.

“What’s the matter?” asked his mother.  “Did one of the boats upset and spill out the fishermen?”

“No’m, Mother.  But a box washed up on shore, and it’s nailed shut, and it’s heavy, and maybe Vi’s doll is in it!  Oh, please come down and see the box on the beach!”

CHAPTER XVI

CAUGHT BY THE TIDE

Ever since they had come to Cousin Tom’s, at Seaview, the six little Bunkers had hoped to find some treasure-trove on the beach.  That is, Russ and Rose and Vi and Laddie did.  Margy and Mun Bun were almost too little to understand what the others meant by “treasure,” but they liked to go along the sand looking for things.

At first, when the children came to the shore, they had hoped to dig up gold, as Sammie Brown had said his father had when shipwrecked.  But a week or so of making holes in the sand, and finding nothing more than pretty shells or pebbles, had about cured the older children of hoping to find a fortune.