Laurie shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied, “but I have a hunch that he will be back Tuesday. Kewpie’s taking this pretty seriously, Ned, and he’s really trying mighty hard. Sometimes I think that if only he wasn’t so outrageously like a dumpling he could do something at it!”
CHAPTER XI
ON LITTLE CROW
Mae Ferrand was not on hand the next afternoon when the twins and Bob Starling reached the Widow Deane’s. Mae, Polly informed them, had gone to Poughkeepsie to spend Sunday with her grandmother. They decided to go down to the river for their walk this afternoon, and were soon descending Walnut Street. At the station they crossed the tracks, passed the freight-shed, and went southward beside the river, blue and sparkling in the spring sunlight. Then they had to return again to the tracks and cross a bridge that spanned a narrow inlet. The inlet connected the river with a shallow stretch of marsh and water known as the Basin which lay between the tracks and the big rock-quarry. The quarry was slowly but very surely removing the hill called Little Crow, and the face of the quarry was fully eighty feet in height from the boulder-strewn base to the tree-topped summit. It was here that stone was being obtained for the work on which Mr. Starling’s company was engaged. Spur-tracks ran from the railroad to the base of the high cliff, about two hundred yards distant, and from the railroad again to the stone-walled dock wherein the quarry company loaded to lighters for water transportation. The Basin was a favorite place for skating in winter, and Ned reminded the others of several episodes of three months back.
“Remember the time Elk Thurston tried to get ashore over there by the rushes?” asked Ned. “Every time he put his foot down the ice broke and let him through.”
“And he got angrier and angrier,” laughed Polly, “and tried to hurry and—”
“Fell flat,” chuckled Laurie. “They told him the ice wouldn’t hold him over there, but he always knows a little more than any one else. And, look, there’s the old Pequot Queen over there yet. It’s a wonder some one doesn’t take her away or break her up or something.”
“Nobody knows who she belongs to, I heard,” said Bob. “The old ferry company went bust three or four years back, and the quarry company can’t touch her because she isn’t theirs. I heard they had a bill for dockage as long as my arm against the Queen, though.”
“Still, that’s the quarry dock she’s in,” said Ned, “and she must be in the way there. I don’t see why they don’t push her out and let her float down the river.”
“She’d be a menace to navigation,” replied Bob knowingly. “The law would get them if they tried that.”