“We’re going sideways,” Westy said.
“Frontways and sideways, what do we care?” I said.
“Railroad travel is all right, but ocean travel for me,” Will said.
“What are you kicking about?” Pee-wee yelled. “We’ve got both.”
“If a stray airplane would only drop on us now we’d be happy,” I said.
“You want too much,” Pee-wee shouted. “We can’t have everything.”
CHAPTER XXXVI—THE OTHER ENDING
Now if you want to know all about that, I mean what happened, you can find it in the Bridgeboro paper of the next day. Even newspaper reporters came from New York to find out about it. And they had articles and pictures and everything.
That was the first time in a good many years that the creek had backed up into the marsh. Always that creek flows into the river. But the river was so full that it made the creek back up, and I should worry about all that business, because this is vacation and I’m not thinking about geography. If the creek wanted to back up it’s none of my business. That’s between the creek and the river and the uncivil engineers, and I wouldn’t trouble my young life about it.
But, anyway, once a long time ago when a creek ran through that marsh there were some scows there. Some people called them barges. Anyway, they were canal boats. They used four of those to lay the tracks across when they ran the line up to town. The other three were pretty rotten, but the one that was made out of cedar was all right. The marsh kept the seams tight. As long as the hull was tight nothing could keep it down when the water rose. It would take more than those old rusty tracks to press it under water. Lucky for us our car was right on it. Afterwards they found that the other three barges had water in them up to the level of the water outside, and when the water rose it flowed right into them and they stayed on the bottom. That shows what cedar is.