Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris, Mayor for a Day - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 8

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Pee-wee was too engrossed in his own plans to follow up the preparations which went forward in the Liventi home.

Late that very Sunday night residents on Terrace Avenue might have seen (if they had been interested enough to look) a funny, stout, little Italian man and his wife, both laboring under an avalanche of baggage, trudging hurriedly through the fashionable neighborhood to catch the midnight train to the metropolis. They did not look very gorgeous and theatrical.

But they had left at home fifty dollars to outfit their proud sons with scout uniforms and such accessories as Pee-wee had represented as being indispensable to scouting. “You got to have belt axes and scout jack-knives and compasses,” Pee-wee had told the brothers; “and you ought to have cooking sets too, but anyway, you can eat out of mine.” He represented these appurtenances as being necessary in undertaking the perilous journey of five miles through familiar woodland to Little Valley.

For Pee-wee intended that the scout number on the church anniversary program should be in all ways realistic. He intended to show Little Valley what scouting was, not only by stage performance but by a more picturesque demonstration. His active mind had conceived the scout exhibition on a very large scale. He and his scout comrades were going to hike through the woods (perhaps even cook their supper there) and trudge up to the church lecture room like true pioneers, compasses, belt axes, jack-knives, cooking sets, marimba and all.

They were to arrive in Little Valley as if it were some frontier settlement and they had sojourned hundreds of miles to reach it. Then it would be explained to the audience (by the minister perhaps) that these scouts, disdaining railroads and buses, had “hiked through the woods” and so on. It would be a picturesque appearance upon the stage, far surpassing the gracious and graceful bows of Signor and Signora Liventi on the Keith circuit.

Poor Bruno and Tasca had to do their own scout shopping and they did it bashfully and unseen by other boys, for though they were proud to be scouts, they were diffident about coming out into the open in their new roles. In the evenings of that momentous week, while their old grandmother altered their precious new khaki suits to fit them they practiced the Poet and Peasant overture on the marimba, as their father had told them to do, and brushed up on some lively popular airs with a dexterity of teamwork that was uncanny. But they did not forget to practice tying and untying a number of complicated knots (using the family clothes-line), for they had it on the highest authority that they must do these things in order to be accepted into the class of tenderfoot scouts.

As for Pee-wee, he was busy organizing the new Chipmunk Patrol, for his fame as a producer was second only to his fame as an organizer. He was, in fact, safely anchored in the Raven Patrol of the First Bridgeboro Troop, but he was continually revolting from its authority and starting new patrols which never attained the requisite number for membership. These patrols, after tremendous enterprise and glowing announcements, invariably fizzled out. The First Bridgeboro Troop, and especially the well-established Ravens, did not take these revolutionary undertakings too seriously. Usually a new patrol was started every time a strange boy moved to town. The present enterprise was not viewed apprehensively. The troop did not mind, and as for the little chipmunks that frequented the woods, probably they did not care either.

But the Liventi brothers cared. The Chipmunk Patrol meant as much to them as the Declaration of Independence did to the thirteen colonies. They saw it as the only way to get into scouting. So they studied the scout laws and practiced the salute and rehearsed the oath and tied knots and perfected their skill with the gorgeous, shining marimba.

As the days of that memorable week dragged along and they read about trailing and stalking and signaling, they became a little ashamed of their one great accomplishment. But then, they were ashamed of the whole business too; not ashamed exactly, but they could not bear to have the boys of the neighborhood know that they were preparing to be scouts; they were afraid that the noisy rabble that called them wops would somehow find new material for mirth in this. They hoped that Pee-wee would not speak of it. And he didn’t speak of it—he yelled it.