WE ARE SAVED
So then we all sat on the railing of the desert island and sang _Follow
your leader_, and Pee-wee joined in good and loud. He kept the fish
under his arm. When it comes to a showdown Pee-wee is loyal. He can even
be loyal to a fish.
Maybe we sat there for as much as an hour and Hervey was telling us
about all the crazy things you can do on a Follow your leader hike. All
of a sudden Garry shouted, “A sail! A sail! Another sail on the
horizon!”
“Is it the same horizon?” I asked him.
“It’s a red sail,” he said.
“It’s a red cow, you mean,” I told him.
“We are saved!” they all started yelling again. “A cow! A cow! A red cow
with white spots! She is coming to our rescue!”
“Maybe she’ll give us some malted milk,” Hervey said.
Oh boy, I had to laugh. There, away way down the road a cow was coming
along, waddling from one side to the other and as she came nearer we
could see how she was swishing her tail.
“She’s making about ten knots an hour,” Garry said; “she’s coming
straight for us. She is bringing milk to the starving castaways. Watch
and see if she turns into that side road.”
“She has passed it!” Bert yelled. “She is coming straight for us under
full sail. Hold the fish up as a signal of distress. She is a hero, I
mean a shero.”
It looked awful funny to see that old cow lumbering along, and every
time she stopped to eat a leaf or something we thought she was going to
turn into a side lane.
“There’s a little girl right behind her,” Bert said. “She’s carrying a
big whip; she’s driving the cow.”
That little girl was about half as big as Pee-wee. She had on a big
sunbonnet and a kind of a gingham apron and she came hiking along behind
the cow with that great big whip over her shoulder. She looked awful
little.
“Do you think I want to be rescued by her?” the kid shouted.
“I’d let a mosquito rescue me, I’m so hungry,” I said.
Pretty soon the little girl and the cow were right at the end of the
road where the end of the bridge belonged. The cow didn’t seem surprised
but the little girl did. The cow just started to eat grass as if she
didn’t care whether she got across or not.
“Road closed on account of a desert island,” Bert called.
“You have to take a detour around through the Panama Canal,” Garry
shouted. “Don’t be frightened, we won’t hurt you.”
I said, “Hey, little girl, would you be kind enough to go to the nearest
house and tell the people that some boy scouts are starving on this
bridge on account of it being open?”
“Why don’t you close it,” she asked us kind of just a little bit scared
and surprised.
“Because it doesn’t work,” I said. “See, we’ll show you. It’s on a
strike.”
So then we all started pushing the big lever and she began to laugh.
“Do you think it’s a joke?” Pee-wee shouted at her.
“You’rrre dunces,” she said, rolling her r’s awful funny. “Do you think
you can push it arraound like a trreadmill churrrn?”
“I don’t know what a treadmill churn is,” I told her, “because I’ve
never been marooned on one——”
“Don’t you even know how to make butterrr?” she said.
“We know how to eat it,” I said, “and that’s enough.”
“You’rrre trying to turrrn it raound,” she called. “It daon’t go all the
way raound, it goes _back_. Lift that plug in the floorrr and put the
leverrr in therrre and then push; it’ll go back the same way. It only
goes half-way and back—Mr. Smarrrty.”
“_G-o-o-d night!_” I said. “I thought it was a merry-go-round.”
“Did you think you werrre ter th’ caounty fairrr?” she asked us.
She just stood there staring at us as if she thought we were escaped
lunatics from Luna Park.
I said, “Pardon us, but we never studied drawing so we don’t know
anything about drawbridges. Do you mean this thing in the floor that
looks like the head of a bolt?”
“Right therrre at yourrr feet,” she said.
On the floor about three feet from the lever was a kind of a round iron
plate that looked like the top of a big bolt. It was just a kind of a
plug and it lifted out. All we had to do was to haul the lever out and
put it in there and push. There was a kind of reverse gear that made the
bridge go back. And all the while we had been pushing and pushing and
trying to make that pesky old bridge keep going around like a
merry-go-round. But that wasn’t the way it worked. The end of it that
belonged at the north had to go back to the north; the bridge only went
half-way around.
It wasn’t hard closing it again when we got it started. It moved back
very slowly until the ends of it fitted the ends of the road. The little
girl just stood there kind of disgusted with us. Pee-wee didn’t say a
word.
As soon as the way was open the cow started across, the little girl
after her. She looked back two or three times as if she didn’t know what
to make of us. Once the cow looked back, kind of puzzled like; that’s
the way it seemed to me.