The highway from Bridgeboro was a broad, smooth road, a temptation anda delight to speeders, where motorcycle cops lurked in the bushes hardlywaiting for cars with New York licenses.
It was late in the afternoon when they reached Baxter City and here theyturned into such a road as Charlie vowed he had never seen before.
Scarcely had they gone a mile over rocks and ruts when the dim woodsclosed in on either side, imparting a strange coolness. It was almostlike going through a leafy tunnel projecting branches brushed the top ofthe car and mischievously grazed and tickled their faces. The voices ofthe birds, clear in the stillness, seemed to complain at this intrusioninto their domain.
"I'd like to know how I'm going to get back through this jungle afterdark," Charlie said. "I wonder what anybody wanted to start a villagedown here for?"
"Maybe--maybe they did it kind of absentmindedly," Pee-wee said. "Inever started a village so I don't know."
"Well, you'll startle one anyway," Charlie said.
"I guess the village isn't much bigger than you are."
The road took them southward through the valley. They were not far westof the highway but the low country and the thick woods obscured itfrom view. They could hear the tooting of auto horns over that way andsometimes human voices sounding strange across the intervening solitude.
"I don't see why they didn't set the village down over at the highway;it's not more than a mile or so," Charlie said. "Maybe they were afraidthe autos would run over it; safety first, hey? Nobody'll run over ithere, that's one sure thing."
Pee-wee took the last bite of a hot frankfurter he had bought at aroadside shack on the highway and was now more free to talk.
"Listen," he said, "what's that?"
It was a distant rattling sound which began suddenly and ended suddenly.They both listened.
"There must be a bridge up there along the highway," Charlie said,"that's the sound of cars going over it. Loose planking, hey?"
Pee-wee listened to the rattling of the loose planks as another car spedover the unseen structure, little dreaming of the part that bridgewas destined to play in his young life. The commonplace noise of theneglected flooring seemed emphasized by the quiet of the woodland. Thatreminder of human traffic, so near and yet so far and out of tune withall the gentler sounds of the valley, presented a strange contrast andjarred even Pee-wee's stout nerves.
"There goes another," Charlie said; "we must be nearer to the highwaythan I thought."
They had, indeed, inscribed a kind of loop and having passed itsfarthest point from the main road were traveling toward it again andwould have emerged upon it just beyond the bridge but for the woodembowered and sequestered village which was their destination. The firstsign of this village was a cow standing in the middle of the grass-grownroad as if to challenge their approach. Perhaps she was stationed thereas a sort of traffic cop.
CHAPTER V
ENTER PEPSY
It will be seen by a glance at the accompanying sketch that the villageof Everdoze was about opposite the bridge on the highway. From thismain road the village could be reached by a trail through the woods. Onhearing of this, Charlie expressed regret that he had not allowed hispassenger to make the final stage of the journey on foot.
"Well, I never in all my life !" said Aunt Jamsiah as Pee-wee steppedout of the car. "In goodness' name, where's the rest of you? I thoughtyou were a great, tall, strapping boy. I hope your appetite's biggerthan your body. And what on earth is that saucepan for? Are you going tocook us all alive? Did you ever see such a thing?" she added, speakingto Uncle Ebenezer who had stepped forward to welcome his nephew.
"He's all decked out like a carnival! He's just too killing!" She thenproceeded to embrace him while his martial paraphernalia clanked andrattled.
"We won't need any more brass band," said a young girl in a ginghamapron and with brick red hair in long tightly woven braids, who stoodclose by; "he's a melodeon. I don't see what they sent such a big carfor with such a little boy. 'Taint no fit, it ain't."
Pee-wee gave this girl a withering look which she boldly returned,continuing to stare at him. Her face was covered with freckles and shewas so unqualifiedly plain and homely in face and attire that she mightbe said to have been attractive on the ground of novelty.
"Pepsy," said Mrs. Quig, addressing her, "you shake hands with Walterand tell him you and he are going to be good friends. You come righthere and do as I say now and no more of those looks."
"I ain't going to kiss him," the girl said by way of compromising.
"You give him a welcome just like Wiggle is doing," said Aunt Jamsiah,"and be ashamed that you have to learn your manners from such as he. Youdo as I say now."
"You're welcome--and I can beat you running," the girl said.
"Girls are afraid of snakes," Pee-wee retorted.
Meanwhile the individual who had been cited as a model of socialcorrectness by Aunt Jamsiah stood upon the doorstep looking eagerly upinto Pee-wee's face and wagging his tail with vigorous and lightningrapidity. Wiggle's tail was easily the fastest thing in Everdoze. Hishead vibrated in unison with it and his look of intentness carried withit all sorts of friendly expectations. He fairly shook with excitementand cordiality. He followed the sedan car a few yards upon its homewardjourney and then, by a sudden impulse, deserted it and returned to aposition directly in front of Pee-wee with wagging tail and questioninggaze. He seemed to say, "I'm ready for anything, the sky is the limit."
"You haven't had a bite to eat since breakfast and you're starving. Ican tell it," said Aunt Jamsiah. "You come right in the kitchen."
"I had a lot of frankfurters and things at the places along thehighway," Pee-wee said. "I had waffles at one place. I bet they make alot of money along that road selling things. There are shacks all theway. All the autoists stop and buy things to eat. You can get tires andeverything."
"Oh, I wouldn't want to eat tires," said Pepsy.
"You think you're smart, don't you?" Pee-wee said.
"What are your soldier clothes for?" the girl wanted to know.
"They're not soldier clothes," Pee-wee said;
"I'm a scout."
"I bet you don't know as much as Miss Bellson does."
"I bet I don't either," Pee-wee said, "so I win."
"She's the school teacher here and she knows everything."
"Did she know I was coming?"
"No she didn't and--"
"Then she doesn't know everything," Pee-wee said.
"Smarty, smarty!" the girl retorted, "I came out of an orphan home andthat's more than you can say.".
"You only get one helping of dessert there," said Pee-wee. "I'd ratherbe a scout than an orphan. I know a feller who was an orphan and he wassorry for it afterwards."
"Are you going to stay all summer?"
"Till school opens," Pee-wee said.
"Do you want me to show you where there's a woodchuck hole?"
At this point Pee-wee was summoned again to the kitchen where he ate asumptuous repast, after which Pepsy and Wiggle took him about and showedhim the farm.
Pee-wee and Pepsy fenced a good deal but seemed to progress in thiscautious and defensive way toward a friendly understanding. As forWiggle, he danced about, following elusive scents that led nowhere,carried off and back again by quick impulse, till at last the threeended their tour of inspection at a little summer house which had beenbuilt over a spring by the roadside.
Here they drank of the bubbling, crystal water. Wiggle doing this aseverything else, with erratic impulse, drinking a dozen times and notmuch at any time.
The dying sunlight painted the slopes of the valley with crimson tintsand the countryside was very still. Through the woods to the west couldbe heard occasionally the discordant noise from the loose flooring ofthe bridge on the highway as an auto sped over it. In the quiet eveningthe sound, with its sudden start, its rattling clamor and its quickcessation, made a jarring note in all the surrounding peaceful
ness.
"That's what wakes me up in the morning, the mail wagon going over,"Pepsy said; "I know it's time to get up then. Those planks can talk,they say the same thing every day."
You have to go back, You have to go back, You have to go back.
You listen to-morrow morning."
"They could never wake me up," Pee-wee said, which was probably true."What do you mean about their saying you have to go back?"
"When Aunt Jamsiah took me, I was a probator. Do you know what thatmeans?"
"It's what they do with people's wills," Pee-wee said.
"It means if I don't behave I have to go back to the orphan home," thegirl said. "And every day I was afraid I'd have to go back--for a long,long time, I was. And when I was lying in bed mornings I'd hear theplanks saying that--
You have to go back, You have to go back.
just like that, and I'd get good and scared."
"You won't have to go back," said Pee-wee.
"You leave it to me, I'll fix it. Those planks--I've known lots ofplanks--and they can't tell the truth. Don't you care. I wouldn'tbelieve what an old plank said. Trees are all right, but planks--"
"I don't notice it so much now," Pepsy said; "that was a year ago andAunt Jamsiah says I'm all right and mind good except I'm a tomboy. Thatain't so bad, is it? Being a tomboy? A girl and me tried to set theorphan home on fire because they licked us, but I'm good here. But Iwish they'd put a new floor on that bridge. Anyway, Aunt Jamsiah saysI'm good now."
Pee-wee was about to speak, but noticing that the girl's eyes were fixedupon a crimson patch on the hillside where the sun was going down, andseeing that her eyes sparkled strangely (for indeed they were not prettyeyes) he said nothing, like the bully little scout that he was.
"Anyway, one thing, I wouldn't let an old bridge get my goat, Iwouldn't," he said finally, "and besides, you said you would show me awoodchuck hole."
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SCOUT
Pepsy's right name was Penelope Pepperall and Aunt Jamsiah had taken herout of the County Home after the fire episode, by way of saving her fromthe worse influence of a reformatory. She and Uncle Ebenezer had agreedto be responsible for the girl, and Pepsy had spent a year of joyousfreedom at the farm marred only by the threat hanging over her thatshe would be restored to the authorities upon the least suspicion ofmisconduct.
She had done her work faithfully and become a help and a comfort to herbenefactors. She had a snappy temper and a sharp tongue and was, indeed,something of a tomboy. But Aunt Jamsiah, though often annoyed andsometimes chagrined, took a charitable view of these shortcomingsand her generous heart was not likely to confound them with genuinemisdoing.
So the stern condition of Pepsy's freedom had become something of adead letter, except in her own fearful fancy, and particularly when thatdiscordant voice of the bridge spoke ominously of her peril.
Pepsy had been trusted and had proven worthy of the trust. She had neverknown any mother or father, nor any home save the institution fromwhich Aunt Jamsiah had rescued her, and she had grown to love herkindly guardians and the old farm where she had much work but also muchfreedom. "Chores will keep her out of mischief," Aunt Jamsiah had said.
Wiggle's ancestry and social standing were quite as much a mysteryas Pepsy's; he was not an aristocrat, that is certain, and havingno particular chores to do was free to devote his undivided timeto mischief; he concentrated on it, as the saying is, and therebyaccomplished wonders. He was Pepsy's steady comrade and the partner ofall her adventurous escapades.
Pepsy was not romantic and imaginative, her freckled face and tightlybraided red hair and thin legs with wrinkled cotton stockings, protestedagainst that. She had a simple mind with a touch of superstition. Itwas a kind of morbid dread of the institution she had left which hadconjured that ramshackle old bridge up on the highway into an ominousvoice of warning, She hated the bridge and dreaded it as a thinghaunted.
Pee-wee soon became close friends with these two, and from a rathercautious and defensive beginning Pepsy soon fell victim to the spell ofthe little scout, as indeed everyone else did. Pepsy did not surrenderwithout a struggle. She showed Pee-wee the woodchuck hole and Pee-wee,after a minute's skillful search, showed her the other hole, or backentrance, under a stone wall.
"There are always two," he told her, "and one of them is usually under astone wall. They're smart, woodchucks are."
"Are they as smart as you?" she wanted to know.
"Smarter," Pee-wee admitted, generously; "they're smarter than skunksand even skunks are smarter than I am."
"I like you better than skunks," she said. Wiggle seemed to be of thesame opinion. "I like all the scouts on account of you," she said.
No one could be long in Pee-wee's company without hearing about thescouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping) advertisementof the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking and stalking andsignaling and the miracles of cookery which his friend Roy Blakeley hadperformed.
"Can he cook better than you?" Pepsy wanted to know, a bit dubiously.
"Yes, but I can eat more than he can," Pee-wee said. And that seemed torelieve her.
"I can make a locust come to me," he added, and suiting the action tothe word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded locustto his very hand. At such wonder-working she could only gape and stare.Wiggle appeared to claim the locust as a souvenir of the scout's magic.
"You let it go, Wiggle," Pee-wee said. "If you want to be a scout youcan't kill anything that doesn't do any harm. But you can kill snakesand mosquitoes if you want to." Evidently it was the dream of Wiggle'slife to be a scout for he released the locust to Pee-wee, wagging histail frantically.
"You have to be loyal, too," the young propagandist said; "that's arule. You have to be helpful and think up ways to help people. No matterwhat happens you have to be loyal."
"Do you have to be loyal to orphan homes?" Pepsy wanted to know. "Ifthey lick you do you have to be loyal to them?"
Here was a poser for the scout. But being small Pee-wee was able towriggle out of almost anything. "You have to be loyal where loyalty isdue," he said. "That's what the rule says; it's Rule Two. But, anyway,there's another rule and that's Rule Seven and it says you have to bekind. You can't be kind licking people, that's one sure thing. So it's atechnicality that you don't have to be loyal to an orphan home. You canask any lawyer because that's what you call logic."
"Deadwood Gamely's father is a lawyer," Pepsy said, "and I hate DeadwoodGamely and I wouldn't go to his house to ask his father. He's a smartyand I hit him with a tomato. Have I got a right to do that--if he's asmarty?"
Here was another legal technicality, but Pee-wee was equal to theoccasion. "A--a scout has to be a--he has to have a good aim," he said.
CHAPTER VII
A BIG IDEA
They had been driving the cows home during this learned exposition onscouting. Two things were now perfectly clear to Pepsy's simple mind.One, that she would be loyal at any cost, loyal to her new friend, andthrough him to all the scouts. She knew them only through him. Theywere a race of wonder-workers away off in the surging metropolis ofBridgeboro. She could not aspire to be one of them, but she could beloyal, she could "stick up" for them.
The other matter which was now settled, once and for all, was that itwas all right to throw a tomato at a person you hated provided only thatyou hit the mark. Aunt Jamsiah had been all wrong in her anger at thatexploit which had stirred the village. For to throw a tomato at the sonof Lawyer Gamely was aiming very high.
The son of Lawyer Gamely had a Ford and worked in the bank at BaxterCity and was a mighty sport who wore white collars and red ties and saidthat "Everdoze was asleep and didn't have brains enough to lie down,"and all such stuff.
Pee-wee let down the bars while the patient cows waited, a
nd ScoutWiggle (knowing that a scout should be helpful) gave the last cow a snipon the leg to help her along.
Here, at these rustic bars, ended Pepsy's chores for the day and in thedelightful interval before supper she and Pee-wee lolled in the wellhouse by the roadside. Wiggle, with characteristic indecision, chasedthe cows a few yards, returned to his companions, darted off to chasethe cows again, deserted that pastime with erratic suddenness, andreturned again wagging his tail and looking up intently as if toask, "What next?" Then he lay down panting. Mr. Ellsworth, Pee-wee'sscoutmaster, would have said that Wiggle lacked method. ...
"If I had a lot of money," Pepsy said, "you could teach me all thethings that scouts know and I'd pay you ever so much. Once I had fortycents but I spent it at the Mammoth Carnival. I paid ten cents to throwsix balls so I could get a funny doll and I never hit the doll and whenI only had ten cents left I made believe the doll was Deadwood Gamelyand I hated and hated with all my might while I threw the ball the lastsix times but I couldn't hit the doll."
"You can't aim so good when you're mad," Pee-wee said, "so if you wantto hit somebody with a tomato or an egg or anything like that you justhave kind thoughts about the person that you're aiming at, only you'renot supposed to throw tomatoes and eggs and things because you can havemore fun eating them. I wouldn't waste a tomato on that feller becauseanyway you've got your tongue."
"You can't sass him," said Pepsy, "because he uses big words and he'ssuch a smarty and he makes you feel silly and then you begin to cry andget mad. When he says I'm an orphan and things--and things--Wigglehates him, too, don't you, Wiggle?" The girl was almost crying then andPee-wee comforted her.