Читать книгу Roy Blakeley - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 6

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Pee-wee says it grows thicker and I say it grows thinner, so I put it both ways. I told him things would begin to stir up in this chapter and he said a thing always gets thicker when you stir it. I should worry.

“Suppose we should go boating or something like that where there’s a lot of water,” I told him; “that would thin it some if you added water, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re crazy,” he shouted.

Westy Martin wanted to name it The Deep Dyed Villain—so you can call it that if you want to—I don’t care.

Now I’ll start off. You remember about Mr. Donnelle saying that he had a wireless. Well, pretty soon after what I’ve been telling you about, the men went away and they were all laughing and good-natured about it. I heard one of them say that the Boy Scouts were a wide-awake lot. Believe me, they wouldn’t say that if they saw us sleeping after a day’s hike at Temple Camp, If you heard Vic Norris snore, you’d think it was the West Front in France.

Well anyway, Mr. Donnelle wanted Pee-wee and me to stay at his house a little while, because he said he was kind of interested in us. He would listen to Pee-wee very sober like and then begin to laugh. And whenever Pee-wee tried to explain, it only made him laugh more.

“Anyway, I could see you weren’t a very bad kind of a spy,” Pee-wee said.

Jiminety! I had to laugh.

Well, Mr. Donnelle asked us all about the Scouts and we told him all about them—Pee-wee mostly did that. He’s a scout propaganderlet—that’s a small sized propagandist. We told him how we didn’t know how we are going to manage to get up to Temple Camp in our launch, because it would only hold about seven or eight boys and we had twenty-four, not counting Captain Kidd, the parrot.

“Well, now I have a little scheme,” he said, smiling all the while, “and perhaps we can hit some sort of a plan. If I can only get you boys out of the way, away up at camp, I’ll be able to carry on my German propaganda work.” Then he winked at me and I knew he was kidding Pee-wee.

Well, believe me, we hit a plan all right; we more than hit it, we gave it a knockout blow.

All the while we were talking, he was taking us across the lawn till pretty soon we came to a little patch of woods and as soon as I got a whiff of those trees, good night, I felt as if I was up at Temple Camp already. That’s a funny thing about trees—you get to know them and like them sort of.

Then pretty soon we came to a creek that ran through the woods and I could see it was deep and all shaded by the trees. Oh, jiminy, it was fine. And you could hear it ripple too, just like the water of Black Lake up near Temple Camp. If I was a grown-up author I could write some dandy stuff about it, because it was all dark and spooky as you might say, and you could see the trees reflected in it and casting their something or other—you know what I mean.

“Can you follow a trail?” Mr. Donnelle asked us.

“Trails are our middle names,” I told him, “and I can follow one——”

“Whitherso’er——” Pee-wee began.

“Whither so which?” I said. Because he was trying to talk high brow just because he knew Mr. Donnelle was an author.

So he led us along a trail that ran along the shore all in and out through trees, and he said it was all his property. Pretty soon I could see part of a house through the trees and I thought I’d like to live there, it was so lonely.

“You mean secluded,” Pee-wee said. Mr. Donnelle smiled and I told him Pee-wee was a young dictionary—pocket size.

Pretty soon we reached the house and, good night, it wasn’t any house at all; it was a house-boat. And I could see the fixtures for a wireless on it, only the wires had been taken down.

Then Mr. Donnelle said, “Boys,” he said, “this is my old workshop and I have spent many happy hours in it. But I don’t use it any more and if you boys think you could all pile into it, why you are welcome to it for the summer. It has no power, but perhaps you could tow it behind your launch. Anyway you may charter it for the large sum of nothing at all, as a reward for foiling a spy.”

“I—I kind of knew you were not a spy all the time,” said Pee-wee.

Well, I was so flabbergasted that I just couldn’t speak and even Pee-wee was struck dumb. We just gaped like a couple of idiots, and after a while I said, “Cracky, it’s too good to be true.”

“So you see what comes from collecting books for soldiers and for keeping your eyes open,” Mr. Donnelle said; “you have caught a bigger fish than you thought. Now suppose I show you through the inside.”

Now here is the place where the plot begins to get thicker and, believe me, in four or five chapters it will be as thick as mud. We were just coming up to the house-boat to go aboard it, when suddenly the door flew open and a fellow scampered across the deck and ran away.

I could see that he had pretty shabby clothes and a peaked cap and I guess he was startled to hear us coming. In just a few seconds he was gone in the woods and we all stood gaping there while the boat bobbed up and down, on account of him jumping from it. But I got a squint at his face all right, and I noticed the color of his cap and how he ran, and I’m mighty glad I did, because that fellow was going to come into our young lives again and cause us a lot of trouble, you can bet.

Mr. Donnelle said he was probably just a tramp that had been sleeping in the boat and he didn’t seem to mind much, only he said it would be better to keep the door locked.

“Maybe he might have been a——” Pee-wee began.

“No siree,” I said. “We’ve had enough of deep-dyed villains for one day, if that’s what you were going to say.”

“Maybe we’d better track him,” said Pee-wee, very serious.

“Nix on the tracking,” I said, “I’ve retired from the detective business, and now I’m going to be cook on a house-boat.”

“We’ll have a good anchor anyway if you make biscuits,” Pee-wee said.

“They’ll weigh more than you do anyway,” I fired back. And Mr. Donnelle began to laugh.

Well, we didn’t bother our heads any more about the tramp, but I could see that Pee-wee would have been happier if we’d have thought it was the Kaiser or Villa, instead of just a plain ordinary tramp, looking for a place to sleep. But oh, crinkums, you’ll be surprised when you hear all about that fellow and who he was and I suppose you’d like me to tell you now, wouldn’t you? But I won’t.

I’ve got to go to camp meeting now, so goodbye, see you later.