It was easy to explore America after Columbus had shown the way and it was a simple matter now for Townsend, with the little shovel, to dig a hole three or four feet deep about the traffic sign.  The boys all kneeled about, peering in as if buried treasure were there, until an area of muddy wood was revealed.  Roly Poly knocked it with a rock and the noise convinced them that the wood was of considerable area and that probably nothing was beneath it.

“Well—­what—­do—­you—­know—­about—­that?” Billy asked incredulously.

“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 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!”