THE PLOT GROWS THINNER—OR ELSE THICKER
Pee-wee says it grows thicker and I say it grows thinner, so I put it
both ways. I told him things would begin to stir up in this chapter and
he said a thing always gets thicker when you stir it. I should worry.
“Suppose we should go boating or something like that where there’s a lot
of water,” I told him; “that would thin it some if you added water,
wouldn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” he shouted.
Westy Martin wanted to name it The Deep Dyed Villain—so you can call it
that if you want to—I don’t care.
Now I’ll start off. You remember about Mr. Donnelle saying that he had a
wireless. Well, pretty soon after what I’ve been telling you about, the
men went away and they were all laughing and good-natured about it. I
heard one of them say that the Boy Scouts were a wide-awake lot. Believe
me, they wouldn’t say that if they saw us sleeping after a day’s hike at
Temple Camp, If you heard Vic Norris snore, you’d think it was the West
Front in France.
Well anyway, Mr. Donnelle wanted Pee-wee and me to stay at his house a
little while, because he said he was kind of interested in us. He would
listen to Pee-wee very sober like and then begin to laugh. And whenever
Pee-wee tried to explain, it only made him laugh more.
“Anyway, I could see you weren’t a very bad kind of a spy,” Pee-wee
said.
Jiminety! I had to laugh.
Well, Mr. Donnelle asked us all about the Scouts and we told him all
about them—Pee-wee mostly did that. He’s a scout propaganderlet—that’s
a small sized propagandist. We told him how we didn’t know how we are
going to manage to get up to Temple Camp in our launch, because it would
only hold about seven or eight boys and we had twenty-four, not counting
Captain Kidd, the parrot.
“Well, now I have a little scheme,” he said, smiling all the while, “and
perhaps we can hit some sort of a plan. If I can only get you boys out
of the way, away up at camp, I’ll be able to carry on my German
propaganda work.” Then he winked at me and I knew he was kidding
Pee-wee.
Well, believe me, we hit a plan all right; we more than hit it, we gave
it a knockout blow.
All the while we were talking, he was taking us across the lawn till
pretty soon we came to a little patch of woods and as soon as I got a
whiff of those trees, good night, I felt as if I was up at Temple Camp
already. That’s a funny thing about trees—you get to know them and like
them sort of.
Then pretty soon we came to a creek that ran through the woods and I
could see it was deep and all shaded by the trees. Oh, jiminy, it was
fine. And you could hear it ripple too, just like the water of Black
Lake up near Temple Camp. If I was a grown-up author I could write some
dandy stuff about it, because it was all dark and spooky as you might
say, and you could see the trees reflected in it and casting their
something or other—you know what I mean.
“Can you follow a trail?” Mr. Donnelle asked us.
“Trails are our middle names,” I told him, “and I can follow one——”
“Whitherso’er——” Pee-wee began.
“Whither so which?” I said. Because he was trying to talk high brow just
because he knew Mr. Donnelle was an author.
So he led us along a trail that ran along the shore all in and out
through trees, and he said it was all his property. Pretty soon I could
see part of a house through the trees and I thought I’d like to live
there, it was so lonely.
“You mean secluded,” Pee-wee said. Mr. Donnelle smiled and I told him
Pee-wee was a young dictionary—pocket size.
Pretty soon we reached the house and, _good night_, it wasn’t any house
at all; it was a house-boat. And I could see the fixtures for a wireless
on it, only the wires had been taken down.
Then Mr. Donnelle said, “Boys,” he said, “this is my old workshop and I
have spent many happy hours in it. But I don’t use it any more and if
you boys think you could all pile into it, why you are welcome to it for
the summer. It has no power, but perhaps you could tow it behind your
launch. Anyway you may charter it for the large sum of nothing at all,
as a reward for foiling a spy.”
“I—I kind of knew you were not a spy all the time,” said Pee-wee.
Well, I was so flabbergasted that I just couldn’t speak and even Pee-wee
was struck dumb. We just gaped like a couple of idiots, and after a
while I said, “Cracky, it’s too good to be true.”
“So you see what comes from collecting books for soldiers and for
keeping your eyes open,” Mr. Donnelle said; “you have caught a bigger
fish than you thought. Now suppose I show you through the inside.”
Now here is the place where the plot begins to get thicker and, believe
me, in four or five chapters it will be as thick as mud. We were just
coming up to the house-boat to go aboard it, when suddenly the door flew
open and a fellow scampered across the deck and ran away.
I could see that he had pretty shabby clothes and a peaked cap and I
guess he was startled to hear us coming. In just a few seconds he was
gone in the woods and we all stood gaping there while the boat bobbed up
and down, on account of him jumping from it. But I got a squint at his
face all right, and I noticed the color of his cap and how he ran, and
I’m mighty glad I did, because that fellow was going to come into our
young lives again and cause us a lot of trouble, you can bet.
Mr. Donnelle said he was probably just a tramp that had been sleeping in
the boat and he didn’t seem to mind much, only he said it would be
better to keep the door locked.
“Maybe he might have been a——” Pee-wee began.
“No siree,” I said. “We’ve had enough of deep-dyed villains for one day,
if that’s what you were going to say.”
“Maybe we’d better track him,” said Pee-wee, very serious.
“Nix on the tracking,” I said, “I’ve retired from the detective
business, and now I’m going to be cook on a house-boat.”
“We’ll have a good anchor anyway if you make biscuits,” Pee-wee said.
“They’ll weigh more than you do anyway,” I fired back. And Mr. Donnelle
began to laugh.
Well, we didn’t bother our heads any more about the tramp, but I could
see that Pee-wee would have been happier if we’d have thought it was the
Kaiser or Villa, instead of just a plain ordinary tramp, looking for a
place to sleep. But oh, crinkums, you’ll be surprised when you hear all
about that fellow and who he was and I suppose you’d like me to tell you
now, wouldn’t you? But I won’t.
I’ve got to go to camp meeting now, so goodbye, see you later.