Laddie was digging a hole in the sand and trying to think of a new riddle, and Violet had just finished asking Russ a lot of questions when, all of a sudden, George Carr, the little boy whose dog had been bitten by the Sallie Growler, came running around a group of sand dunes, crying: 

“Oh, the boat’s upset!  The boat’s upset, and all the men are spilled out!  And the fish, too!  Come and see the upset boat!”

CHAPTER XXIII

THE SAND FORT

“What do you mean—­the boat upset?” asked Russ, looking up from the sand fort he was making on the beach.  “Do you mean one of your toy boats and is it make-believe men that are spilled out?”

“No, I mean real ones!” exclaimed George.  “It’s one of the fishing boats, and it was just coming in from having been out to the nets.  It was full of fish and they’re all over, and you can pick up a lot of ’em and they’re good to eat.  And maybe one of the men is drowned.  Anyhow, there’s a lot of ’em in the water.  Come on and look!”

“Where is it?” asked Laddie.

“Right down the beach!” and George pointed. “’Tisn’t far.”

“Come on, Mun Bun and Margy!” called Rose as she saw Russ and Laddie start down the beach with George and his dog.  “We’ll go and see what it is.  Vi, you take Mun Bun’s hand and I’ll look after Margy.”

“Shall we leave our dolls here?” asked Vi.

“Yes.  There’s nobody here now and we can go faster if we don’t carry them,” answered Rose.  “Here, Mun Bun and Margy, leave your dolls with Vi’s and mine.  They’ll be all right.”

Rose laid her doll down on the sand and the others did the same, so that there were four Japanese dolls in a row.

“Won’t the waves come up and get ’em?” asked Margy as she looked back on the dolls.

“No, the waves don’t come up as high as the place where we left them,” said Rose, who had taken care to put the dolls to “sleep” well above what is called “high-water mark,” that is, the highest place on the beach where the tide ever comes.

“Come on!  Hurry if you want to see the men from the upset boat!” George called back to Rose and the others.

“Let’s wait for ’em,” proposed Laddie.  “Maybe they’ll be lonesome.  I’m going to wait.”

“Well, we’ll all wait,” said George, who was a kind-hearted boy.  “If you can’t see the men swim out you can see the lot of fish that went overboard.”

As the children came out from behind the little hills of sand they saw, down on the beach, a crowd of men and boys.  And out in the surf and the waves, which were high and rough, was a large white boat, turned bottom up, and about it were men swimming.

“Oh, will they drown?” asked Russ, much excited.

“No, I guess not,” answered George.  “They’re fishermen and they ’most all can swim.  Anyhow the water isn’t very deep where they are.  They’re trying to get their boat right side up so they can pull it up on the beach.”