Now you’d better look on the map I made. Maybe it isn’t much good, but
it’s better than the map of Europe. Our car was over about in the middle
of the Sneezenbunker land. Because we didn’t want to take the reward
from the Orphan Home for finding the inventor, my father said we could
offer Tony fifty dollars to move his wagon for a little while. Fifty
dollars would buy five hundred sandwiches. It would buy a thousand
pieces of pie. We didn’t have any trouble with Tony that time.
Now Mr. Jenson moved his locomotive very slowly past where Slausen’s
used to stand, and right across Willow Place. It pushed our car ever so
little. The brakeman stood on the front platform of our car and stopped
it with the brakes. He said they worked pretty good. Then the locomotive
pushed the car about a couple of hundred feet so as to give it a good
start, and then backed away from it.
We all stood there shouting, “Hurrah!” “All aboard for Van
Schlessenhoff’s field!”
The brakeman was the only one on the car. Now this is just exactly what
happened. The car moved along into the marsh and pretty soon we could
only see the upper part of it on account of the cat-tails. When it got
to about the middle of the marsh it stopped. We followed along the
tracks and when we got to where the car was, the brakeman said he had
slowed it down because the trestle was shaky and he was afraid it would
give way. He had slowed the car down too much and it had stopped. He
said he was sorry, but he had to go back to his train.
So there was our car, right in the middle of Cat-tail Marsh, with the
cat-tails growing up close all around it, and the mosquitoes mobilizing
for a grand drive. We knew Mr. Jenson couldn’t help us any more, because
that trestle would never hold his big locomotive.
“This is a nice fix we’re in,” Westy said. “We’ll be eaten up here.”
“What do we care?” Pee-wee shouted. As long as there was some question
of eats it didn’t make any difference to him where we were.
I said, “I’m not talking about you eating; I’m talking about the
mosquitoes. Wait till the sun goes down, there’ll be nothing left of us,
if we stay here.”
“Well, let’s be thankful the car didn’t go down, anyway,” one of the
fellows said.
“Sure, it might be worse,” another one of them shouted.
I said, “Oh, sure, this is a fine place for a scout headquarters.
There’s only one better place that I know of and that’s on top of a
volcano.”
“Can we go on top of a volcano?” the inventor wanted to know.
“Not this afternoon,” I told him.
“This is a dickens of a place to spend the summer,” they all began
saying. “What are we going to do? We can’t get the car either way now.
It might just as well have broken through the trestle and gone down into
the marsh. It’s no good to us here.”
“I say let’s leave it here and come on up to Temple Camp,” Hunt Manners
said. “We’ve had trouble enough with it. Let it stay here and rot.”
I said, “Don’t let’s get discouraged. Consider the busy little
mosquitoes. See how happy they are.”
“Sure,” Westy said; “and so would we be if we were in their shoes.”
“In their _shoes_?” Pee-wee yelled.
“They ought to wear rubbers down here,” I said. “Let’s have a meeting of
the general staff to decide what we’ll do. We’re in the midst of the
enemies.”
Dorry Benton said, “I vote that we go inside and shut the doors and the
windows. S—lap! There’s one.”
All around we could hear bzzzzzzz, bzzzzz——
I said, “S—_lap_! There goes another.”
“Bzzzzzz—sl—_ap_!” Gee whiz, that was all I could hear. We looked like
a class in physical training.
“Come on inside,” I said. “This is getting terrible.”
It wasn’t so bad inside with the doors and windows shut. We chased some
of them out and killed a lot of others. It was our lives against theirs.
“Don’t give them any quarter,” one fellow shouted.
“Don’t give them even a dime,” I said.
“Don’t give them a cent,” Pee-wee shouted, slapping at them right and
left.
Talk about the Huns! Oh, boy!
After a terrible massacre we got most of them out of the car. Then we
sat down to talk about what we had better do. We were in a pretty bad
fix, that was sure. It looked as if that was the end of our dear old
car, anyway for a meeting place in the summer, because we couldn’t stand
against an army of several million billions. A scout is brave, but——
It was quite late in the afternoon and we were getting hungry. The
mosquitoes had finished their supper. I hope they enjoyed it. Pretty
soon it began to rain outside and the wind began to blow. One good
thing, it blew the mosquitoes away. That hour or so that we spent in the
car behind closed doors is known in scout history as the Siege of
Cat-tail Marsh. And, believe me, we didn’t like it very much. I’m not so
stuck on history anyway.