Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris on the Briny Deep - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 6

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It was all very well for Pee-wee to storm and bluster, but just the same he wanted Stubby in his patrol. He wanted him now more than he had wanted him before. For the carnival was a failure. There was no blinking that fact; it was a frost. For two nights the sturdy little scout had camped with his patrol in the old tennis courts pavilion, and that had been pleasant. It had been the only successful feature of poor Pee-wee’s mammoth enterprise. This little touch of camping life prior to the regular camping season almost made the unhappy undertaking worth while. With it, the hero solaced his disgruntled followers as they cooked and ate the fragrant waffle and the grateful frankfurter in the primeval wilds of the Baldwin tennis courts.

As long as the carnival had been in Pee-wee’s mind, Stubby Piper with his sumptuous dowry, had been but an incidental consideration. He believed that the carnival would “get” Stubby; that this new boy would be wooed and won by this gala achievement of the Chipmunks. Pee-wee engineered tremendous enterprises, but never more than one at a time. Now that ruin stared him in the face, as he and his patrol ate the frankfurters and waffles which the public had disdained, Stubby loomed large as a candidate to scouthood. To have a boy whose father owned a sporting goods store was like discovering a gold mine.

Now, amid the wreck of his grand carnival, Pee-wee’s thoughts turned wistfully to this fine boy whom everybody liked. The Silver Foxes were to blame for enticing Stubby with their absurdities. They were responsible for his making a quibble about a bear. When Pee-wee spoke about wild life he spoke in a general way. Scouts were primitive, oh very, but they did not carry wild animals around with them. Roy Blakeley, the arch-demon and Nemesis of Pee-wee’s life, was to blame for the contamination and downfall of Stubby Piper.

And Roy too, in his heart, was serious about this matter. He did not want Stubby for his dowry, but for himself alone. Why not? Here was as fine a boy as ever happened to be outside the realm of scouting. Roy, in serious reflection (for he was sometimes serious) knew that such a boy as Stubby would be quite out of place in the Chipmunk Patrol. By a dash of good luck, Pee-wee had succeeded in recruiting Ben Maxwell, and Ben was glad to be a sort of big brother in Pee-wee’s harum-scarum organization. But the Silver Foxes had no intention of losing Stubby Piper.

The Chipmunks kindled a modest camp-fire outside the pavilion that night and made a ghastly attempt to be merry on the scene of their disastrous enterprise. “Anyway, we’re having a lot of fun camping here,” said the sturdy little leader. “Gee whiz, no matter what, we’re having a lot of fun. Maybe even if a thing is a failure, maybe all the time it may be a success too, hey? Maybe it’s more successful when it’s a failure.”

His loyal patrol seemed not to appreciate the force of this reasoning. “If they don’t like it we don’t have that blame sure,” said Tasca Liventi, with that little foreign shrug of his shoulders. “Musick they do not like.”

“We ought to have had a jazz band,” said Ben Maxwell good-humoredly. “Give the public what they want.”

“This we don’t know how,” said Bruno. “Anyway, I’ve got no use for the public,” said Pee-wee; “especially the Silver Foxes. Publics are a lot of fools—geee whiz. All the publics I ever knew never know what they wanted; I wouldn’t bother with them. Nature is better, that’s one sure thing.”

At all events nature soon asserted itself and the Chipmunks were sound asleep. It was pleasant, camping in the pavilion. They had brought their army cots to the scene, and the interior of the picturesque little building looked not unlike one of the patrol cabins up at Temple Camp. And Pee-wee Harris dreamed a gorgeous dream. He dreamed that the carnival was a success.

Outside the hedge fence crowded all the poor boys of Bridgeboro who had not money enough to enter with the surging throng at the gate. Pee-wee himself was standing before a scout fire tossing waffles on a tennis racket and delivering them to the hungry multitude all crisscross by the taut strings. The tennis net was up and the posts to which it was fastened at either end were two huge frankfurters.

Little Billy Jansen was selling tennis balls to thronging patrons, only these were licorice, lime and lemon—three for ten cents. The white markings on the court were made with powdery marshmallows, and within these confines were more patrons who had paid ten cents each for the privilege of batting marshmallows back and forth across the net. The Liventi brothers with sledge hammers were playing a stirring melody on a vast marimba amid cheering that had all the volume of a tidal wave.

Then, as the deafening music ceased, the cheering died away until there was nothing left but an appalling roar as if the whole gala scene were suddenly changed to a savage jungle. Again and again the roaring could be heard. For a few moments it ceased. Then it started again, and all the patrons of the Chipmunk Carnival ran helter-skelter from the scene, leaving only Pee-wee counting the wagon loads of coin which were the profits of his sensational enterprise. But the roaring started again and he could not hear the jingle of coin, because it was drowned in that fearful voice of the forest....