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 of planks--and they can't tell the truth. Don't you care. I wouldn't believe 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 and Aunt Jamsiah says I'm all right and mind good except I'm a tomboy. That ain't so bad, is it? Being a tomboy? A girl and me tried to set the orphan home on fire because they licked us, but I'm good here. But I wish they'd put a new floor on that bridge. Anyway, Aunt Jamsiah says I'm good now."

Pee-wee was about to speak, but noticing that the girl's eyes were fixed upon a crimson patch on the hillside where the sun was going down, and seeing that her eyes sparkled strangely (for indeed they were not pretty eyes) he said nothing, like the bully little scout that he was.

"Anyway, one thing, I wouldn't let an old bridge get my goat, I wouldn't," he said finally, "and besides, you said you would show me a woodchuck hole."

CHAPTER VI

THE WAY OF THE SCOUT

Pepsy's right name was Penelope Pepperall and Aunt Jamsiah had taken her out of the County Home after the fire episode, by way of saving her from the worse influence of a reformatory. She and Uncle Ebenezer had agreed to be responsible for the girl, and Pepsy had spent a year of joyous freedom at the farm marred only by the threat hanging over her that she would be restored to the authorities upon the least suspicion of misconduct.

She had done her work faithfully and become a help and a comfort to her benefactors. She had a snappy temper and a sharp tongue and was, indeed, something of a tomboy. But Aunt Jamsiah, though often annoyed and sometimes chagrined, took a charitable view of these shortcomings and her generous heart was not likely to confound them with genuine misdoing.

So the stern condition of Pepsy's freedom had become something of a dead letter, except in her own fearful fancy, and particularly when that discordant voice of the bridge spoke ominously of her peril.

Pepsy had been trusted and had proven worthy of the trust. She had never known any mother or father, nor any home save the inst.i.tution from which Aunt Jamsiah had rescued her, and she had grown to love her kindly guardians and the old farm where she had much work but also much freedom. "Ch.o.r.es will keep her out of mischief," Aunt Jamsiah had said.

Wiggle's ancestry and social standing were quite as much a mystery as Pepsy's; he was not an aristocrat, that is certain, and having no particular ch.o.r.es to do was free to devote his undivided time to mischief; he concentrated on it, as the saying is, and thereby accomplished wonders. He was Pepsy's steady comrade and the partner of all her adventurous escapades.

Pepsy was not romantic and imaginative, her freckled face and tightly braided red hair and thin legs with wrinkled cotton stockings, protested against that. She had a simple mind with a touch of superst.i.tion. It was a kind of morbid dread of the inst.i.tution she had left which had conjured that ramshackle old bridge up on the highway into an ominous voice of warning, She hated the bridge and dreaded it as a thing haunted.

Pee-wee soon became close friends with these two, and from a rather cautious and defensive beginning Pepsy soon fell victim to the spell of the little scout, as indeed everyone else did. Pepsy did not surrender without a struggle. She showed Pee-wee the woodchuck hole and Pee-wee, after a minute's skillful search, showed her the other hole, or back entrance, under a stone wall.

"There are always two," he told her, "and one of them is usually under a stone 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 skunks and even skunks are smarter than I am."

"I like you better than skunks," she said. Wiggle seemed to be of the same 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 the scouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping) advertis.e.m.e.nt of the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking and stalking and signaling and the miracles of cookery which his friend Roy Blakeley had performed.

"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 to relieve her.

"I can make a locust come to me," he added, and suiting the action to the word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded locust to 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 you can't kill anything that doesn't do any harm. But you can kill snakes and mosquitoes if you want to." Evidently it was the dream of Wiggle's life to be a scout for he released the locust to Pee-wee, wagging his tail frantically.

"You have to be loyal, too," the young propagandist said; "that's a rule. You have to be helpful and think up ways to help people. No matter what happens you have to be loyal."

"Do you have to be loyal to orphan homes?" Pepsy wanted to know. "If they lick you do you have to be loyal to them?"

Here was a poser for the scout. But being small Pee-wee was able to wriggle out of almost anything. "You have to be loyal where loyalty is due," 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 be kind. You can't be kind licking people, that's one sure thing. So it's a technicality that you don't have to be loyal to an orphan home. You can ask any lawyer because that's what you call logic."

"Deadwood Gamely's father is a lawyer," Pepsy said, "and I hate Deadwood Gamely and I wouldn't go to his house to ask his father. He's a smarty and I hit him with a tomato. Have I got a right to do that--if he's a smarty?"

Here was another legal technicality, but Pee-wee was equal to the occasion. "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 on scouting. 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, and through him to all the scouts. She knew them only through him. They were a race of wonder-workers away off in the surging metropolis of Bridgeboro. She could not aspire to be one of them, but she could be loyal, she could "stick up" for them.

The other matter which was now settled, once and for all, was that it was all right to throw a tomato at a person you hated provided only that you hit the mark. Aunt Jamsiah had been all wrong in her anger at that exploit which had stirred the village. For to throw a tomato at the son of Lawyer Gamely was aiming very high.

The son of Lawyer Gamely had a Ford and worked in the bank at Baxter City and was a mighty sport who wore white collars and red ties and said that "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, and Scout Wiggle (knowing that a scout should be helpful) gave the last cow a snip on the leg to help her along.

Here, at these rustic bars, ended Pepsy's ch.o.r.es for the day and in the delightful interval before supper she and Pee-wee lolled in the well house by the roadside. Wiggle, with characteristic indecision, chased the cows a few yards, returned to his companions, darted off to chase the cows again, deserted that pastime with erratic suddenness, and returned again wagging his tail and looking up intently as if to ask, "What next?" Then he lay down panting. Mr. Ellsworth, Pee-wee's scoutmaster, would have said that Wiggle lacked method. ...

"If I had a lot of money," Pepsy said, "you could teach me all the things that scouts know and I'd pay you ever so much. Once I had forty cents but I spent it at the Mammoth Carnival. I paid ten cents to throw six b.a.l.l.s so I could get a funny doll and I never hit the doll and when I only had ten cents left I made believe the doll was Deadwood Gamely and I hated and hated with all my might while I threw the ball the last six times but I couldn't hit the doll."

"You can't aim so good when you're mad," Pee-wee said, "so if you want to hit somebody with a tomato or an egg or anything like that you just have kind thoughts about the person that you're aiming at, only you're not supposed to throw tomatoes and eggs and things because you can have more fun eating them. I wouldn't waste a tomato on that feller because anyway you've got your tongue."

"You can't sa.s.s him," said Pepsy, "because he uses big words and he's such a smarty and he makes you feel silly and then you begin to cry and get mad. When he says I'm an orphan and things--and things--Wiggle hates him, too, don't you, Wiggle?" The girl was almost crying then and Pee-wee comforted her.

"Do you think I don't know any long words?" he said. "I know some of the longest words that were ever invented and--and--even I can make special ones myself. Once I--don't you cry--once I was kept in school and Julia Carson was kept in too, because she wriggled in her seat--you know how girls do. I had to choose a word and write it a hundred times and I didn't want to get through too soon, because I wanted to get out the same time she did. So I chose the word incomprehensibility, and I--"

"Is that girl pretty?" Pepsy wanted to know.

"She's got a wart on her finger. It's the best one I ever saw," Pee-wee said. "She's afraid to get in a boat, that girl is."

"I hate her," Pepsy said.

"What for?" Pee-wee inquired. "Because she has a wart? Don't you know it's good luck to have warts?"

"Because--because she was bad and had to stay after school," Pepsy said.