A RURAL PARADISE
Pee-wee looked about him at an enchanted scene. He seemed to have been
transported to a region made to order for the Boy Scouts of America.
That a pair of auto thieves should have brought him to this rural
Paradise seemed odd enough.
As he gazed about and looked up at the quiet star-studded sky his fears
were all but dispelled. For were not the friendly woods and water near
him? They seemed like rescuing allies now. In the soft, enveloping arms
of those silent woods he would find safety and shelter, and so he should
find his way home through their dim concealment.
The building in which the car had been left was an old weather-beaten
shack, which, judging from the sawdust all about, might once have been
used as an ice-house. This seemed likely, for it stood near the shore of
a placid lake in the black bosom of which shone a myriad of inverted
stars and through which was a golden path of flickering moonlight. The
ice-house, or whatever it was, had never been painted and the grain stood
out on the shrunken wood like veins in an aged hand.
At a respectable distance from the woods near the shore where Pee-wee
stood was a sizable village, or young town, big enough to have traffic
signs and parking zones and a main street and a movie show and such like
pretentious things. Between this town and the shore were a few outlying
houses, but mostly sparse woodland. To the north the woods were thicker.
The lights of this neighboring town formed a cheery background to the
dark, silent lake shore. This town was West Ketchem and the chief
sensation in West Ketchem during the last few years had been the
destruction by fire of the public school, a calamity for which every boy
went in mourning.
Across the lake, Pee-wee could see other and fewer lights. These
belonged to a smaller village in which nothing at all had ever happened,
not even the burning of its school. Far from it. The school stood there
in all its glory, under the able supervision of Barnabas Wise and
Birchel Rodney, the local board of education.
About in the center of the lake, Pee-wee saw a small red light.
Sometimes there seemed to be two lights, but he thought that one was the
reflection of the other in the water. The light seemed very lonely, yet
very inviting out there. He supposed it was on a boat. Perhaps some one
was fishing....
But in all this surrounding beauty and peacefulness, Pee-wee saw no sign
of the murder of any captive maiden. His eagle eye _did_ see where a
boat had been drawn up on shore, and if any "shoves" and other cruel and
abusive "handling" had been administered by those scoundrels with
seventy pistols, it must have been to that poor defenseless boat. Or
perhaps they were out in the middle of the lake at that very minute
sinking their victim.
Anything might happen--in the mind of Scout Harris.