Pee-wee went jumping and dancing around like a cat having a fit, all the
while waving the letter in the air.
“What is this? Some new kind of wig-wag signalling?” I asked him.
“Now you see! Now you see!” he started shouting. “Talk about your pirate
ships! One fellow _dropped in his tracks_—what more do you want? Another
one was wounded; see? Now!” I said, “Oh, I’m not complaining. Six would
have been better, but one is better than nothing. You win, Kid. This old
piece of rolling junk has had a past; I admit it. It’s been through
adventures.”
“My mother doesn’t believe in adventures, because somebody gets dead,”
little Alf piped up in that funny way he has.
“Well somebody got dead here, all right,” I told him. “I wish we knew
all about it.”
“_Look—look here!_!” Pee-wee fairly yelled. “_Here’s the hole!_”
He had pulled a little wooden button, something like a cork, out of the
woodwork at the side of the car, just a little below the window-sill,
and was wriggling his finger in a little round hole that the daylight
showed through.
“Now you see!” he shouted. “Talk about dark pasts——”
“You’re right, Kid,” I said; “we have to take off our hats to this old
car. It has Blackhead’s old schooner _Mary Ann_ beaten twenty ways. You
win.”
“We’ve got to—_you_ know—what do you call—it—fathom the mystery,” he
said.
“I guess there isn’t any mystery, Kid,” I told him. “But there must have
been some wild scene, all right.”
Honest, I can’t tell you which had me more interested, that little round
hole or the letter. Anyway, it seemed as if one proved the other. I
could just see how the bullet had come in there and hit that fellow’s
arm, and kind of, I could see him leaning out of the window and I could
see one of those fellows dead and the other one trying to limp away, and
the train starting with two men dead on it, and another one dying. You
bet, Pee-wee was right; if that old car could only talk....
“It happened before we were born,” Pee-wee said.
“Yop,” I said; “jiminy, you can’t stop thinking about it, can you? This
very same old car that we’re sitting in was rattling along maybe a mile
a minute, to get to a place where there was a hospital.”
Gee whiz, we forgot all about measuring for the lockers, and just sat
there in the car, gaping around. It seemed kind of different than
before, on account of what we knew had happened in it. And I just
couldn’t stop thinking about that.
“Do you know what I think?” I said, all the while looking around. “I
think there’s a lot more about this car, too. I think it must have been
in a wreck once; look at those shutters.”
There were about half a dozen shutters that we hadn’t been able to pull
down, but the men had done it for us, and now I could see why it was
they had stuck so. It was because they were all smashed and knocked out
of shape. And besides that there was a long board fitted into the side
of the car that hadn’t always been there, because it was soft wood, not
like the regular wood of the car.
“What shall we do about it?” Pee-wee asked me.
“Nothing, as far as I can see,” I told him. “I don’t see that there’s
anything to _fathom_. I’ll paste the letter in the troop-book, after
we’ve shown it to the fellows.”
Pee-wee looked terribly disappointed. I guess he had a wild idea that
that robber was still beating it and that we could catch him if we
hurried up. He seemed to think that he was on the trail of something or
other.
That night we had our first troop meeting in the old car, and Mr.
Ellsworth read the letter to all the fellows. He said it was very
interesting to hear these shots out of the past (that was the way he
said it), and how we could always think of our quaint meeting-place, as
the scene of a truly remarkable adventure of days gone by. He uses dandy
big words, Mr. Ellsworth does.
Then the troop settled down to making plans for going up to Temple Camp,
because that’s where we always go in vacation. Poor Pee-wee and his
letter had to take a back seat. Mr. Ellsworth said that after all,
up-to-date adventures are better than old stale ones, and that we should
worry about pirates boarding ships and robbers stopping trains and
shooting and things like that, that happened a long while ago. He said
that, because he’s down on the movies, especially Wild West stuff, and
he’s always trying to keep us thinking about scouting. I’ve got his
number, all right.
But, anyway, Pee-wee wouldn’t let me paste that old letter in our
troop-book. He just hung on to it. I don’t know what he was thinking
about, but I guess he had an idea that something would be _revealed_.
That’s his favorite word—_revealed_.
On the way home from troop-meeting, he gave me a free lecture. Gee, I
wish you could have heard him.
“Suppose that pirate chief in the movies hadn’t kept the—_you_ know—the
tell-tale papers,” he said; “what would have happened? Do you think I’d
let this letter be pasted in the troop-book? No siree! Look at that
fellow—Ralph Rogers—in the Fatal Vow. He let the other fellow have the
mortgage and see what happened. His old gray haired mother was turned
out in the snow. No siree; safety first, that’s what _I_ say. Suppose a
descendant of that robber——”
“Don’t make me laugh, Kid,” I said; “let’s go in Bennett’s and get a
couple of cones. What do you say?”
That’s one thing that Pee-wee was strictly up-to-date on—ice-cream
cones. When it comes to ice-cream cones, even dark adventures have to
stand in line. Believe me, many’s the ice-cream cone that dropped in its
tracks—I mean dripped—when he gave it a mortal blow.
I had to laugh to see him hiking alongside of me, with his belt-axe
dragging his belt way down and his compass dangling around his neck like
a locket. His pockets are always stuffed full of Lyric programs and
clippings about missing people that he intends to find, and directions
out of papers about how to do in case he should meet a lion or an
elephant—on Main Street, I suppose. If he should bunk into a rattlesnake
on his way to school all he’d have to do would be to haul out a clipping
and then he’d know to “stare right at it with glaring eyes and it would
retreat in terror.” Honest, he’s a scream. He read in “Boys’ Life” that
a grizzly is afraid of bright red, so he has a red glass in his
flashlight. He’s not taking any chances. _Be Prepared._
I wish you could see that kid. He always carries an onion with him,
because he thinks if you stick a pen in an onion it will write invisible
and then if you hold the paper over a fire the writing will come out
clear. He’s got his pockets full of invisible writing. I never saw any
of it come out good and strong yet. The only thing that comes out good
and strong is the onion.
Oh boy!