I gave Westy a shake and said, “Wake up and look out of the window! Hurry up! _Westy!_”
In a half a minute we were all staring out of the window.
Will Dawson said, “Are we dreaming or not?”
I said, “I wouldn’t say for sure that I’m awake, but I _think_ I am. Either that or I’ve gone crazy reading ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ _Look!_ There’s the park! We’re about half a mile down the river.”
The inventor started shouting, “Oh, good, good, good! I’m glad. Maybe we’ll go across the ocean! Will we?”
“Nothing would surprise me,” Westy said. “I hope we’ll meet Sinbad, the sailor.”
“This car wouldn’t float,” Will Dawson said.
“Open the window and look out,” Westy said.
“What did I tell you about yellow dogs?” Pee-wee shouted.
“Can I be the captain?” the inventor wanted to know. “Is it a ship?”
“Either that or an insane asylum,” I said.
“Look out of the window,” Westy said. “I see what happened. Come on, let’s look out from one of the doors. I know what happened all right!”
We threw open three or four windows and looked down. Then he ran for one of the doors and looked out. The car was on something, that was sure.
I looked down from the car door just as Westy jumped down. He said, “It’s an old scow just as sure as you live. It was part of the solid part of the trestle. See how the old tracks are broken? What—do—you—know—about—that?”
He pulled off a chip of wood and threw it up to me. “Cedar,” he said; “smell it.”
I saw just how it was. The car was standing on an old scow. The old rusty tracks were twisted and broken off and stuck out over the end. In five seconds we were all down on the deck of it, staring around.
Westy said, “Did you smell it? It’s cedar.”
And just then I remembered about something we had read in a scouts’ book about trees. Westy knows all the different kinds of wood; he’s crazy about trees. This is it, copied right out of the book:
Cedar is the wood most valuable for the hulls of vessels. When kept under water its freshness is everlasting. While other woods rot away this soft, spongy wood that yields so readily to the ax or the jack-knife, defies the decaying effects of water, its soft fiber swelling and toughening even in ordinary dampness. Time is powerless to rot it when it is in its natural element.