Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris on the Briny Deep - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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Pee-wee Harris, Imperial head of the Chipmunk Patrol, sat on the slanting doors of the cellar-way behind his home eating a licorice jaw-breaker. He usually sat down to this agreeable task, for eating a jaw-breaker required time and patient concentration. Sometimes, when Pee-wee was not talking, he could annihilate a jaw-breaker in thirty-two minutes. But he was usually talking. And on this occasion he was not only talking; he was roaring. He was scowling at the universe in general and at Stubby Piper in particular.

Stubby Piper was small and of a jolly rotundity. But he was not as small as the redoubtable little scout whose scathing denunciation he received without a tremor. Stubby Piper was new in Bridgeboro and though he had a scout smile he was not a scout. He was not even ashamed of not being a scout.

Our story opens appropriately in a brief pause while Pee-wee resumed operations on the granite-like jaw-breaker—three for a cent. These were procurable in three colors and flavors; licorice, strawberry and lemon. The effects of the licorice squares were more colorful in the neighborhood of Pee-wee’s mouth.

“If you don’t join you’ll be sorry, that’s all I can say,” Pee-wee observed darkly. “Maybe it’ll be, maybe, ten years—maybe even five or six before I’ll have another place to be filled in my patrol.”

“In ten years you’ll be too old to be a scout,” the sensible Stubby observed.

“That shows how much you don’t know,” the hero thundered. “Even you can be a scout when you’re eighty years old, you can. Look at Daniel Boone.”

“I don’t see him; where is he,” Stubby queried playfully, as he glanced about the Harris yard.

“He’s dead!” Pee-wee thundered.

“Well I’d rather be myself then,” Stubby said.

“You’d rather be yourself than Daniel Boone?” Pee-wee screamed.

“Sure, because I’m alive,” said Stubby.

“Do you call that an argument?” Pee-wee roared.

“I don’t know whether it’s an argument, it’s a fact,” said Stubby.

“All right,” said Pee-wee, with a terrible air of finality. “If you don’t want to be mixed up with fellers that are wild and kind of prim—prim—”

“Not for me,” said Stubby; “I don’t want to be in with fellers that are prim.”

The licorice jaw-breaker had interrupted Pee-wee most unpropitiously in the middle of his favorite word. For a few seconds he chewed resolutely and wiped away a pensive trickle from his heroic chin.

“Will you wait till I say the second syllable!” he roared. “All right if you don’t want to be primitive. That’s all I say—all right.”

“Your pal, Roy Blakeley, says that primitive is a good word for you, because it’s derived from a school primer,” Stubby observed mischievously.

Though he had no intention of becoming a Chipmunk he was greatly amused at Pee-wee.

If there was one thing more than another likely to arouse the head Chipmunk to sublime wrath, it was the mention of Roy Blakeley, the hilarious leader of the Silver Foxes.

“That shows how much of a fool you are listening to what he says. Even everybody says he’s crazy; more people than that say it, even.”

“More people than everybody,” Stubby ventured.

“Even grown-up people say it,” Pee-wee thundered. “He told a tenderfoot that a crowbar is a place where birds go and drink. He told Skinny McCord that hat-trees grow near the water. All right, if you don’t want to be a scout and be wild and everything, and get lost in the woods, and maybe almost even get starved, maybe even. I bet you don’t even know what to do if you’re nearly starved in the woods.”

“Just start and eat,” said the logical Stubby.

“In a—a—howling wilderness, where there isn’t any food,” the primeval Chipmunk demanded.

“Can’t you take your lunch?”

Pee-wee glared in speechless dismay. The curse of civilization was upon the prosaic Stubby and he was hopeless. The head Chipmunk resumed chewing on his licorice jaw-breaker, contemplating Stubby with withering scorn. To tell the truth this terrible caveman of the Boy Scouts did not look as if he were in any danger of starving.

“All right,” he finally said with a kind of grim disgust. “If you don’t want to join, then you needn’t. If you don’t want to be wild, kind of, and connected with Indians and wild animals and pi—”

“Wild Indians don’t eat pie,” Stubby said slyly.

Again Pee-wee had been interrupted by the adamant jaw-breaker which had suddenly taken a strategic position beneath his tongue, completely stopping its colloquial operations.

“I said pioneers!” he finally screamed.

“Oh,” said Stubby.

“And know all about plant life and insects and how to make pancakes and tell the calls of birds—and waffles too—and rabbit-stew and trails and what to do for snake bites—”

“I never heard the call of a waffle,” Stubby said.

Pee-wee had many times heard the call of the waffle; he had often responded to the seductive call of rabbit-stew. It was his habit to jumble everything together in talking and Stubby was highly entertained.

“You ought to join the Silver Foxes,” Pee-wee said disdainfully; “that’s the kind of a patrol for you. They’re all crazier than each other except Roy Blakeley and he’s crazier than all of them put together; he starts crazy hikes, then writes about them. All right, that’s all I say. All right if you don’t want to be connected with wild animals.”

“You’d run if you saw a wild animal,” said Stubby.

“I bet I wouldn’t.”

“I bet you would.”

“I bet I wouldn’t.”

“I bet you would.”

“What do you bet?”

“I don’t bet anything.”

A brief pause followed this volley.

“I bet you don’t even know that scout patrols are named after wild animals,” Pee-wee said.

“Sure, chipmunks.”

“Chipmunks are the wildest kind of wild animals,” Pee-wee thundered. “You don’t have to eat people to be wild. Even flowers are wild, but they don’t bite, do they? That shows how much you don’t know about botany. In scouting there’s all about wild animals—poisonous snakes and all dandy things like that. Scouts even get bitten by deadly lizards, but what do they care? They know how to not get killed—herbs and things, they know all about those for medicines. Even I know how to make tea out of roots. I bet you don’t know a wildcat from a panther. I bet you can’t tell a bear’s tracks from a track made by a wheelbarrow, because they’re almost just the same because once I tracked a bear up at camp only it turned out to be a wheelbarrow—that shows how much alike they are.” He paused for air.

“All right if you don’t want to join,” he said for the twentieth time. “You won’t go to camp and you won’t track and stalk, and you won’t be at camp-fire, and you won’t see bears—maybe—over on the mountain across the lake up at Temple Camp—you ask Westy Martin.”

This last attraction was listed not without some hesitancy even by the enthusiastic Pee-wee. He was a born organizer and propagandist and scrupled not to depict scouting in its most alluring colors to hesitating prospects. But he realized himself that the bear story was a little strong. So he had compromised with his own conscience by introducing the word maybe. Once, up at Temple Camp, a moving object had been seen at the edge of the woods across the lake. Tom Slade had said it might be a bear. Thenceforth, in organizing, first the Hoptoad Patrol, and later the illustrious Chipmunks, Pee-wee had used this bear as part of his missionary equipment. Real or not, it had won little Willie Saunders. In desperation he used it with Stubby Piper, because he wanted Stubby in his patrol. Stubby would bring a fine dowry to the Chipmunks, for his father was none other than Harlow C. Piper of Piper and Jenks, camp equipment and sporting, goods dealers of New York.

“You show me a bear,” said Stubby; “you just show me one bear and I’ll join.”

Here was a challenge indeed. Here was Stubby’s answer to rattlesnake bites and poisonous herbs and waffles and rabbit-stew and Indians, and redoubtable Boy Scouts levying on the wilderness for food and shelter. Here was Stubby’s trump card laid on the table. Perhaps it was not altogether fair that he should use this most picturesque of Pee-wee’s scouting attractions as a challenge, as a condition. But he was a matter-of-fact boy, albeit with a keen sense of humor, and he announced his condition and stuck to it.

“You show me a live bear and I’ll join the Chipmunk Patrol,” he repeated. “And I’ll bring a new tent and a lot of other things, too. I’ll bring a couple of canoes; maybe a rowboat with an outboard motor, too. You just show me one of those bears.”

The eyes of the head Chipmunk opened wide. He realized that he had said a little too much, that he had been too free with his bears if one might so phrase it, but he was captivated by this other boy’s list of attractions. Stubby, it appeared, had also some seductions to offer.

“Will you go up to Temple Camp with me?” Pee-wee asked rather weakly. “You don’t suppose bears walk around here in Bridgeboro, do you? Do you think they hang out on Main Street? Geeeeeeee whiz! That shows how much you don’t know about wild life. Will you go up to Temple Camp with me, so I can—maybe—show you?”

“Sure, I will—any time,” said Stubby. “And I’ll get a sail for the boat, too, so we can use it sometimes instead of the motor.”

“It isn’t time to go up to camp yet,” Pee-wee said, “and besides, anyway, my patrol is going to have a carnival in Baldwin’s Field.” He shifted his ground and tried to reach Stubby by a flank move. “What’s the use talking about bears before it’s time to go to camp where they are—maybe—but sort of sure? They don’t come out just when you want them to, do they? If you’ll join my patrol you can help us have the carnival and sell lemonade and give a show every day, and races and everything, and earn a lot of money so we can have it for our patrol. Gee whiz, we’re going to have a lot of fun, that’s one thing sure. You can be the one to have charge of the lemonade if you want to. So will you join? You can be the one that sells toasted marshmallows if you want to. So will you join? And when we go to camp you can be the captain of that boat too. Even in our carnival, maybe I might even let you be the one to roast the frankfurters. Everybody’s going to come to it and now is your chance to join my patrol and if you don’t you’ll be sorry.”

For just a moment Stubby Piper paused, smiling in unholy mirth at Pee-wee’s discomfort. The new tent, and the canoes, and the boat with the motor, had taken effect in the mind of the adventurous scout.

“I might even get a signal set,” said Stubby innocently.

“Will you join my patrol if I let you be the one to take the tickets at the carnival?” Pee-wee asked. “Will you join if I let you be assistant patrol leader?”

“You know what I said,” said Stubby resolutely. Then he thrust his hands into his pockets and with an amused smile walked away with an air which seemed to say it was a long call from seeing bears to roasting marshmallows.

After he was clear of the Harris premises, he began laughing to himself at Pee-wee’s discomfiture. He laughed at thought of the bear—“maybe.” But most of all he laughed at the proposed carnival. He had caught this squint at Pee-wee from the uproarious Roy Blakeley and others. Already, before it was open, the carnival had become a joke. Everybody laughed at Pee-wee, and this new boy in town was not slow to catch the irreverent spirit of the other scouts toward the leader of the Chipmunks. But he who laughs last—

And that was Pee-wee’s middle name.