“Neither did I. I gave my story to a rewrite man over the telephone. I meant to read the entire account, but was in a hurry to get over here, so I skipped it.”
“Well, I shouldn’t worry about the matter if I were you.”
“I’m sure the boat used in the dynamiting came from Ottman’s,” Penny declared, thinking aloud. “Perhaps Sara is just out of sorts because she and her brother lost their property.”
Making their way along the mud flats, the girls came at last to the tiny stretch of sand where the sailboat had been beached the previous night. It lay exactly as they had left it, cockpit half filled with water, the tall mast nosed into the loose sand.
“What a mess,” sighed Penny. “Well, the first thing to do is to get the wet sail off. We should have taken care of it last night.”
Before beginning the task, the girls wandered toward the nearby bridge to inspect the damage caused by dynamiting. An armed soldier refused to allow them to approach closer than twenty yards. All traffic had been halted, and a group of engineers could be seen examining the shattered pier.
“Is Mr. Oaks around here?” Penny asked the soldier.
“Oaks? Oh, you mean the bridge watchman. He’s been charged with neglect of duty, and relieved of his job.”
Penny and Louise were sorry to hear the news, feeling that in a way they were responsible for the old fellow having left his post. Unable to learn whether or not the watchman was being detained by police, they returned to the beach to salvage their sailboat.
Without a pump, it was a difficult task to remove the water from the cockpit of “Pop’s Worry.” By rocking the boat back and forth and scooping with an old tin can, the girls finally got most of it out.