"You'd better get him out as soon as you can," said his mother.
The children remembered the spot where they had been playing on the sand before they took the pony rides. Nettie ran back there, and soon found her Rag Doll.
"But where's my Plush Bear?" asked Arthur anxiously, looking up and down the beach. "I made a hole here, right by Nettie's Doll, and I put sticks in the hole, like bars in a circus cage, and I left my Plush Bear in the hole."
"Are you sure this is the place?" asked Mrs. Rowe, as she, too, looked searchingly up and down the sand. She did not want Arthur to lose his toy.
"It was right here," declared the fat boy.
"I don't see any hole," went on Mrs. Rowe. Of course she did not know that the pony had scattered the sand, filling up the little cave Arthur had made.
"Oh, where is my Plush Bear?" cried the little fat boy, and he was almost ready to cry. His mother and Nettie helped him look. So did other children, wandering up and down the beach, but there was no sign of the toy. Then a coast guard, one of the men who march up and down the sands, keeping watch for shipwrecks, came along the boardwalk.
"Have you lost something?" asked the guard, as he came down the steps from the boardwalk to the beach.
"We lost a Bear," said Arthur.
"A bear?" cried the guard, in surprise. "A—a bear?"