The next minute that girl started talking Italian to Tony, and, oh, boy,
you should have seen him. Right away he got excited and wanted to dig up
the whole earth. I guess she told him there was a gold mine where his
wagon had been standing.
I don’t know if you know much about mushrooms, but they’re easy to raise
and you can get a lot of money for them, and that’s something that most
scouts don’t know about. All you need is a place that’s kind of damp and
dark, like under a car or a wagon or in a cellar that hasn’t got any
heat. It’s a lot of fun raising them. Maybe that’s why they call them
fungi. Anyway, Minerva Skybrow put the fun in fungi for us all right,
because now we have a dandy little mushroom patch under our car down by
the river and the only competition we have in Bridgeboro is from Tony.
We should worry.
Every Saturday morning people come down to Van Schlessenhoff’s field to
buy mushrooms from us. Only you’ve got to be careful, because if you eat
the wrong kind of mushrooms, the first thing you know some fine day
you’ll wake up and find yourself dead. So you better read what the
handbook says about them.
The kind we raise are dandy big ones and we call them the _Skybrow
mushroom_, and they’re known far and wide—all the way up as far as Main
Street.
Now for the rest of that afternoon we helped Tony dig up mushrooms and
plant them in boxes and spread more of them in the space where his wagon
belonged, and Minerva Skybrow managed the whole business. I guess it
must have been after six o’clock when we heard the milk train whistling,
and, believe me, we were all pretty tired when it pulled into the
station.
Minerva said, “Now isn’t that better than just eating? You’ve won the
day, you’ve kept the tracks clear, and you’ve done something worth
while. You’ve done a good turn in the bargain.”
“And when we start raising mushrooms ourselves,” Pee-wee piped up,
“we’ll have something more to eat, too. Hey?” Jiminy, that’s all that
kid thinks about.
I said to Minerva, “You’re so smart, maybe you can think of a way for us
to get past Slausen’s Repair Shop. Believe me, that’s going to be some
Hindenburg line. Maybe we can tell him to plant rubber bands and
automobile tires will grow up. We should worry; we’ve done enough for
one day.”
Mr. Jenson, who is engineer on that milk train, was mighty nice. He said
that scouts did him a good turn once, and so he was going to pay them
back. While the men were loading the milk cans onto the train he ran his
locomotive very slowly onto those old rusty tracks and the first thing
we knew, _plunk_, he bunked right into our old car. Gee whiz, it looked
good to see it move. It just gave a kind of a jerk.
Then he called down to us and said, “Now where do you want me to leave
this de luxe Pullman Palace car?”
I said, “We want you to push it across Main Street, past where the lunch
wagon usually stands, and right about to the middle of the field. That’s
as far as we can go to-day.”
“You planning to go farther than that?” he asked us.
“Yes, but we have to think of a way,” Westy called up to him.
Mr. Jenson began laughing and he said, “You kids’ll have to do some tall
thinking to get past that old building.”
“That’s all right,” Westy said; “the human mind can move anything.”
Mr. Jenson just said, “All right, over she goes.”
Some of us got on the car and the others walked along and the girls
stayed around, laughing. A couple of them got on the car, but most of
them were kind of afraid, I guess. Maybe they thought it would never
stop. Some men stood around watching and laughing, too. What did we
care?
The locomotive pushed the car so slow that we could walk ahead of it. It
hardly moved. We felt pretty important when we saw the gates go down
across Main Street and people and automobiles waiting till we got past.
Most of the scouts who had come from other towns had gone home and only
our own troop and the girls and a few others were there. But a whole lot
of people were standing around watching and laughing at our old
ramshackle car. It went right over Tony’s new mushroom farm, and then
Mr. Jenson’s fireman came down and we helped him haul a big piece of
timber across the tracks about in the middle of the field, because the
brakes on that car weren’t much good.
Pretty soon the locomotive stopped and our old car just moved so slow
that it hardly moved at all. Then, kerplunk, the wheels ran against the
piece of timber, and the first stage of our what-d’you-call-it,
memorable journey, was over.
After that we helped Tony get his lunch wagon back to where it belonged,
and we all gave Mr. Jenson three cheers when the milk train pulled out.
The boy scouts are all right, and you can see for yourself that you can
do a lot by concerted appetite. But you need brains, too. And if it
hadn’t been for the Girl Scouts and the Erie Railroad, where would we
be, I’d like to know? So that’s why my favorite heroes are the Girl
Scouts and the Erie Railroad. Maybe they’re both kind of slow—I’m not
saying—but good turns are what count.