THE DISTANT FLICKER
I made flipflops for lunch and Pee-wee ate eleven of them. Dub ate
seven. Sandy said he could eat them as fast as I could make them, but I
was four ahead of him when he stopped. So then we each took one. That
made twelve for Pee-wee. He wanted one more but I said it would be bad
luck.
We had bad luck anyway. We dug around all afternoon in all the crevices
and places and we drained out that pool and poked all around between the
rocks in the bottom of it. We couldn’t find any oilskin container. We
turned over lots of rocks in the bed of the brook and looked underneath
to see if anything might have got wedged there. Wherever two rocks were
close together we pried them apart. We found lots of things that had got
caught when they were floating down the stream, pieces of wood and
things like that. And we felt all around at the roots of bushes that
were under water when the brook was running. One place, in a crevice
between two rocks, we found a whistle made out of willow wood. It was so
dry the bark curled right off it. I said I guessed it came from Temple
Camp. But Sandy said _no_, because the brook flowed into Black Lake.
Maybe some kid away up in the mountains made that whistle and lost it in
the brook, hey?
We kept on hunting till suppertime and then I fried bacon and we roasted
potatoes and Pee-wee’s face got all blackened up eating them. So I
opened a can of soup so he could get the black off his face and that
only made his face worse--honest he looked like a coal-bin. There was a
spring and we got water from that. There was a cross cut in the rock
over it and Pee-wee said it was an Indian sign. Dub said, “Maybe the
last of the Mohegans are camping around here.”
“Sure,” I said, “maybe there’s a tribe of Indian motorcycles parked up
the line. Wherever Pee-wee goes he sees Indian signs. Once he saw some
Indian meal in the street and he thought a tribe of Indians had passed
through. He thinks a hotel reservation is where Indians live. I can tell
you what that cross means,” I said, “and you want to remember it
wherever you hike around these parts. It means the water in that spring
has been tested and it’s all right. That cross was put there by a savage
tribe of doctors. Pee-wee knows all about signs. He went to night school
and he can even read them in the dark.”
I had to laugh at the kid, he was sitting there with his face all
blackened up, munching an apple. I said, “Are you sure you had enough to
eat? Pretty soon it will be dark and then you won’t be able to find your
mouth any more.”
“You think you’re smart showing off in front of new fellers,” the kid
said. He could hardly speak, he was having such a mortal combat with a
big bite of apple.
“If you took smaller bites they wouldn’t be so big,” I told him. “You
ought to take your bites in two sections, then you’d think you were
eating two apples--don’t answer till convenient.”
“Ythnkersmartdontyer,” Pee-wee munched at me.
“Explain all that,” I said. “Do you know Pee-wee’s favorite word?” I
asked Dub and Sandy. “_Troop_ because it rhymes with _soup_. Look out
now, he’s going to speak.”
“Do you mean to say Indians were never around here?” the kid shouted.
“Didn’t Uncle Jeb even find an old arrow in the woods?”
“It was an old Pierce-Arrow,” I said. “Pee-wee is so dumb he thinks an
especially fine ford across a stream is called a Lincoln--take your time
and answer, pronouncing each word distinctly.”
“Do you know what he said?” Pee-wee screamed at Dub and Sandy. “He has
to be so smart with new fellers at camp he told Harold Titus that a
tomahawk is a male bird and Harold Titus wrote it down in his scout
record book. I’m warning you to be careful because you’re new fellers
and the first thing you know he’ll make fools of you like when he told
even a little lame tenderfoot that Robin Hood is a bird’s hat, you can
ask Westy Martin in his own patrol and even worse he told another little
feller----”
“We’ll wait while you take a bite,” I said.
“I can eat and talk too!” the kid shouted. “Even he told another
tenderfoot that the rule that says you have to hike one mile and back
means that you have to come back backwards and that tenderfoot tried to
do it and he slipped and hurt his kneecap----”
“That’s no place to wear a cap,” Dub said.
“Absolutely right,” I spoke up gallantly.
“He hurt himself in three places,” the kid yelled.
“He should keep out of such places,” Sandy said.
“Absolutely positively correct the first time,” I said. “A true Scout
wouldn’t go to such places--I leave it to Dub.”
“What places are you talking about?” Pee-wee yelled.
“Any places,” I said. “What’s the difference? As for that tenderfoot or
tender knee or whatever he was, his name was Piker, he was so mean that
when the flag was raised he only gave two cheers. Anyway what’s that got
to do with Indians? Whenever Pee-wee can’t answer an argument he takes a
big bite of his apple--it’s a cinch.”
By that time it was dark and we were just getting ready to start a
little camp-fire when all of a sudden the kid said, “Look!”
“Is it Indians?” I asked him.
“Shh--look!” he said. “There’s a light way down in the other end of the
chasm.”
We all looked, and jiminy crinkums if he wasn’t right. Away far down at
the other end we could see a little light shining. I guess maybe that
was a half a mile away.
“That’s blamed funny,” I said. “I wonder what that is.”
“It’s human beings,” Pee-wee said in a kind of a scared whisper.
“I never heard of anybody camping in here,” I said. Dub and Sandy just
looked. We were all good and surprised. It was just a teeny little
light, away off, but it had us guessing.
Sandy said, “I don’t just like to turn in for the night without knowing
who that is.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“What’s the difference?” Dub said.
“The difference is I’m going to find out who it is,” Pee-wee said. “I’m
going to sneak up and find out. Do you think I’m going to sleep in this
chasm with bandits, maybe? Maybe it’s those same bandits that robbed the
post office in Warnerville the other night.”
I said, “It’s too bad you threw away the core of your apple, you might
need it to throw at them.”
But Dub and Sandy didn’t laugh, they just kept gazing down through the
dark chasm at that little light. Seeing it there kind of made the chasm
seem even more dark and spooky. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there
was some one else in the chasm only, gee whiz, I wanted to know who it
was. A light isn’t always so cheerful--sometimes it’s kind of scary.