THE PLOT GROWS THICKER—THE MUD TOO
Now there’s one thing about Pee-wee, he always dresses up when there are
going to be girls. He wears all his merit badges and his belt-axe so
they’ll know he’s a real hero. He’s the only original boy scout
heart-breaker. Girls always smile at him. Sometimes they even laugh out
loud.
So as soon as he heard the merry sound of girlish laughter in the
neighboring woodland (my sister wrote that) he began to listen and then
he grabbed the rag in the bottom of the boat so as to wash the dirt from
his face.
I guess he was going to dip it in the water when all of a sudden, _good
night_, there were a couple of girls coming out through the bushes. They
were laughing kind of just as if they had been spying on us, but all of
a sudden they set up a howl and the next thing I saw there was Pee-wee
jumping around in the boat and the boat was rocking about half full of
water. One of his legs was outside, and he didn’t seem to know whether
to stay in the boat or get out of it. Gee whiz, it wouldn’t have made
much difference because there was just about as much water inside as
there was outside.
“Oh, he pulled the plug out—_the rag_!” one of the girls said. “Isn’t
that too _funny_!”
“It shows you don’t know what funny means,” Pee-wee spluttered.
By that time the boat was more than half full and he was flopping around
in the water outside it. One good thing, the water was shallow but the
bottom was all mud and he was floundering around in it and lifting one
leg after the other high up trying to walk up on shore. The water was
too shallow to swim in and too deep to walk in especially on account of
the muddy bottom. Pretty soon he was on shore all covered with mud, and
the rest of us were all standing around screaming.
“He pulled the plug out, he _pulled the plug out_!” one of the girls
kept screaming—you know how they do. She said, “I never saw _anything_
so excruciating in all my _born days_!” The other girl was laughing so
hard she couldn’t say a word.
Brent said, “Fair maids, does this boat belong to you?”
One of the girls said, “Yes, does this little boy belong to you? Oh,
he’s just too funny for anything! We had a rag stuffed into a hole in
the bottom of the boat to keep the water from coming in. We’re camping
just above here. Oh, he’s simply covered with mud. You’re simply
_covered_ with mud,” she said to Pee-wee.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he spluttered. “I—I found it out as
soon as you did.”
Brent said very sober like to the girls, “You should have had two holes
in the boat, one for the water to come in through and one for it to go
out through; then a rag would not be necessary.”
“It shows how much you know about scouting,” the kid shouted, all the
while wiping the mud from his clothes and then transferring it to his
face with his hand. “That’s just like girls, stopping a hole up with a
rag. That might have happened in the middle of the lake only it didn’t,
and I might have been drowned on account of that rag, only I wouldn’t
because I know how to swim anyway.”
“Oh, isn’t he just too cute!” one of the girls said.
“And he knows how to swim,” the other said.
I said, “Oh, he’s very smart; he knows more than his teacher, that’s why
she asks him so many questions. Even the head of the Board of Education
asked him, ‘How are things?’ He didn’t know, he had to ask Pee-wee. His
name is Pee-wee for short.”
“He’s certainly short enough,” one of the girls said.
I said, “He only looks short on account of it being such a short
acquaintance. He’ll look shorter when you’ve known him longer.”
Brent said, “You say you’re camping around here?”
“Are you doing your own cooking and everything?” Pee-wee blurted out.
“And your own eating?” I asked them.
“Yes, but we’d just _love_ to have you come and help us do it,” one of
them said.
“Which? The cooking or the eating?” Pee-wee wanted to know.
One of them said, “Dinner is all ready, we were just going to eat it
when we heard voices and we came here to see who it was. And we want you
all to come and help us eat dinner. You know scouts have to be helpful.”
“I’m helpful,” Pee-wee shouted. “I know all about it.”
“He learned about it in the third grade,” I said. “It’s derived from the
Latin word _full_ and the Greek word _help_; _helpful_ meaning full of
helpings. Anything else you’d like to ask him?”
“I’d like to ask you all if you like fish-balls?” she said.
“How many fish-balls?” Pee-wee shouted.
“Can we eat them with our left hands?” Brent wanted to know.
“They’re all crazy,” Pee-wee said, all excited.
“Not the fish-balls _we_ make,” the girl said.
“He means us,” Brent said. “We are on a left-handed hike, and we can’t
turn to the right. If the fish-balls are cooked right we can’t eat
them.”
“Don’t you pay any attention to them,” Pee-wee said, “because over in
camp everybody says they’re crazy, and they even admit it themselves.”
“Suppose some of the fish-balls are left,” one of the girls laughed.
“None of them will be,” I told her. “A scout’s word is to be trusted.
Dinner is over at Temple Camp by now so we might accept an invitation if
we were properly approached—in a left-handed manner.”
“It’ll be accepted anyway by me,” Pee-wee said; “and I’d like to know
what to call you by.”
“My name is Marjorie Eaton,” one of the girls said.
“He’ll be crazy about you,” I said; “he’s so fond of eatin’.”
“And my name’s Stella Wingate,” the other girl said.
So then Brent introduced all of us to the girls in that funny, sober way
he has and told them about our patented left-handed hike. Those girls
said they belonged down at Brookside and were just camping for the day.
If you want to go to Brookside you just row down the outlet and pretty
soon you come to it.
I said, “How far is your camp from here. And can we get to it without
turning to the right?”
Marjorie Eaton said, “I don’t see how you ever expect to get away from
the lake if you keep turning to the left; you’ll just go around and
around and around. I think you’re all too silly. You’ll just go hiking
around forever.”
Brent said, “You never can tell, they may cut a road to the left some
day while we’re going around.”
“Didn’t I tell you they’re all crazy?” Pee-wee shouted.
The other girl said, “If you _must_ go on with such a _perfectly
ridiculous_ thing, why don’t you give a broad interpretation to your
rule?”
“I’d like to give something worse than that to it,” the kid shouted.
“A broad interpretation is bad enough,” I said. “About how broad should
it be?” I asked her.
“Silly,” she said. “If you want to get away from the lake——”
“How about the fish-balls?” Pee-wee piped up.
“If you want to get away from the lake,” she said, “all you have to do
is to pull the boat up on shore and get the water out of it. As you
stand looking out on the lake the outlet is up there to the north. _It’s
to your left._ All you have to do is to row along the shore to your left
till you reach the outlet and then row through the outlet till you see a
path that leads out of it to your left. That goes to Shade Valley. How
many times have you been marching around this lake for goodness’ sake?”
Warde said, “We wouldn’t even have reached the shore if it hadn’t been
for our dog who deserted us and went home to dinner.”
“Well, he’s the only one of the party who has any sense,” Marjorie Eaton
said. Then they both began laughing.
“It’s good you came down to the shore,” the other girl said, “because
now you see you can use the boat and get somewhere without actually
breaking your rule.”
“We just have to kind of bend it a little,” I said.
“I never knew anything so stupid in my life as boys,” Stella Wingate
said.
“Especially boys who have been around so much,” Brent said.
I said, “Girls, you have saved us from being a merry-go-round; you have
shown us a way out. The outlet lets us out the same as it let Pee-wee
in. He was in that very outlet, and he never knew its possibilities.
“Possibilities!” Marjorie Eaton began laughing. “Oh, I think he’s just
_im_possible.”
They were awful nice, those girls were. They said they thought it would
be all right for us to go up to their camp and have dinner with them and
then start for the outlet in the boat. They said they thought that would
be turning to the left and that it was the only way for us to get out of
our rut. They said our resolution was all right but that sometimes a
rule has to be construed freely.
They reminded me of school when they talked. They said our only hope of
escape was by the lake. Marjorie Eaton said that otherwise we would be
the victims of an eternal circle. Gee whiz, they were smart.
“You mean an infernal circle,” I said.
Pee-wee said, “Don’t ever talk to me again about anything round; if it’s
round I have no use for it.”
“Oh, we’re so sorry,” Stella Wingate said. “Then you won’t eat any
fish-balls.”
“Eats don’t count,” the kid said.
“That’s the first time I ever heard you say that,” I told him.
So then we all went up to their camp which was about a couple of hundred
feet from the shore.
And, oh, boy, those were some fish-balls. They counted with Pee-wee all
right, but I lost count of them. Those girls said they had just decided
to take a trip into the woods for a lark.
“You can’t catch any larks around here,” our young hero said, “but there
are wild pigeons. I can tell you all about birds, I know all about
stalking.”
I said, “Don’t mind him, he’s so dumb he thinks that stalking is named
after a stork. He thinks that all the news of the birds is published in
the fly-paper.”
“Oh, he’s just stuck on the fly-paper,” Brent said.