But she hadn’t. They spent a full twenty minutes aboard her, while Laurie explained and Polly’s enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds. Bob, too, came over to Laurie’s side, and even Ned, although he still pretended to doubt, was secretly favorable. As for Mae—well, as Polly went so went Mae! After they had viewed and discussed the Pequot Queen to their satisfaction, Laurie led them back along the river and showed the place he had selected for the Pequot Queen’s future moorings. It was a quiet spot, disturbed by scant traffic along the lane, now that the chain-works was no longer in operation. Passing steamers and tugs might infrequently break the silence with their whistles, and when, further down, a coal-barge tied up at the wharf, the whir of the unloading machinery would come softened by distance. Between the well-nigh unused road and the water lay a strip of grass and weeds, a ribbon of rushes, a narrow pebbled beach. Some sixty feet out a sunken canal-boat exposed her deck-house above the surface. Six yards or so from the tiny beach the remains of a wooden bulkhead stretched. In places the piles alone remained, but opposite where Laurie had halted his companions there was a twelve-foot stretch of planking still spiked to the piles.
“We could bring her up to that bulkhead and make her fast to the piles at bow and stern. I figure that there’s just about enough water there to float her. Then we’d built a sort of bridge or gangway from the bulkhead to the shore. She couldn’t get away, and she couldn’t sink. That old hulk out beyond would act as a sort of breakwater if there was a storm, too.”
“I think it’s a perfectly gorgeous idea,” said Polly ecstatically. “And just see, Mae, how very, very quiet and respectable it is here!”
Ned, though, seemed bent on enacting the rôle of Mr. Spoilsport. “That’s all right,” he said, “but how are you going to get permission to tie her up here? This property belongs to some one, doesn’t it?”
Laurie looked taken aback. “Why, I don’t believe so, Ned. Here’s the road and here’s the river. There’s only a few feet—”
“Just the same,” Ned persisted, “some one’s bound to own as far as high tide.”
“Maybe the folks in the house across the road,” suggested Mae.
“Mean to tell me,” demanded Laurie, “that the fellow who left that canal-boat out there had to ask permission?”
“That’s in deep water,” answered Ned.
“So would the Pequot Queen be in deep water!”