Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris, Mayor for a Day - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 9

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On the day of the big affair in Little Valley, a day never to be forgotten in the annals of scouting, the Chipmunk Patrol had swelled to six members. First and foremost there was Pee-wee, patrol leader of course. He had adopted the wise parliamentary procedure of electing himself before there were any members to vote for anybody else; hence he had a safe majority of one.

Then there were Willis Harlen and Eddie Carlo from the troop that was no more. And there was Peter Tower, a discovery all Pee-wee’s own. He was only three or four inches high, more or less, but what he lacked in size he made up in admiration for Pee-wee. He was under the scout age, which made no difference at all to our hero, since he owned a tent which Pee-wee had not failed to notice in a corner of the Tower lawn. He also had forty-two cents free and clear. Then there were the Liventi boys, Tasca and Bruno. The ceremony of initiation was deferred until after the big show, pending the rounding up of a complete patrol.

“Do we have to play the marimba?” Bruno asked wistfully of Pee-wee on the day preceding the grand pilgrimage. “Scouts don’t do those things, it isn’t in the book,” the timid Bruno protested. He and his brother wanted to be real scouts, not marimba playing scouts; they wanted to be wild and primeval, and skilled in woodlore as Pee-wee had explained that all scouts must be.

“I know why you ask that,” Pee-wee thundered; “it’s because all the fellers are making fun of you and saying ‘Yes, we have no music.’”

Alas, this was true. The sensitive boys had not been able to keep their secret, the whole noisy, jollying throng of scouts and non-scouts had found out that the dark-eyed strangers were in Pee-wee’s new patrol and that their specialty was playing the bimbo, which was the nearest they ever came to the correct name.

“Hey, Bimbo,” called Charlie Bulton on the way home from school one afternoon that week. “Hey, playa da bimbo! I hear you’re going to be boy sprouts, you two. Yes, we have no Americans in the Chipmunk Patrol. We got kids and has-beens and wops.

“But, yes, we got no Americans;

We got no Americans to-day.”

It was a pity that Pee-wee was not present to handle this situation; Bully Bulton, with all his cruel humor, had neither the voice nor the sticking qualities of the head chipmunk. Nor, it may be added, had he the ingenuity of our hero in epithet and thundering repartee.

Tasca Liventi’s eyes blazed. “I am an American,” he said; “I was born in this country as much as you were.”

“We’ve got right to be scouts,” his less impulsive brother said. “It doesn’t hurt you, does it?”

“You hurt me?” Bulton ejaculated, advancing menacingly for the benefit of the lookers-on. “What did you say about hurting me?”

Bruno stood his ground. They made picturesque figures, these two brothers, standing together as if at bay. There was a fine spirit in the face of Tasca as he stared, trembling but resolute, amid this vulgar show.

“I didn’t say anything about hurting you,” he said.

“Hey, how do you get that way—hurting me?” Bulton persisted.

“Look out, Bull, he’ll stab you,” a boy said; “he gotta stillet’.”

The Liventi boys had heard much talk of stilettoes before; the crude mimicry of their father’s broken English was not new to them. It was the denial of their Americanism that hurt. Tasca’s handsome eyes continued to blaze and his brother seemed to hold him back. “Nobody said anything about hurting you,” the latter said. “Why you make a fuss?” The omission of a word now and then was the only suggestion of broken English these boys ever showed. “We got right to be scouts.”

Charlie Bulton subsided; he appeared as if accepting an apology. But he was not going to let the brothers off too easily. “If Kid Harris had asked me to join his patrol he could have had a couple of hundred dollars to start with, the blamed little fool. My father gives away money enough every week to buy that little shack you live in. I suppose you dagoes think you’ll go to camp this summer, but how are you going to do that without money? Your folks haven’t got any money. You wouldn’t be living on Terrace Avenue at all if it wasn’t for those three old tenement houses standing there. It shows how much sense you have to swallow everything a kid like Pee-wee Harris tells you. If he’d asked me he’d have had a good start, maybe a thousand dollars. What does my old man care?”

But just the same Bully Bulton’s old man did care. He wanted to see his son in the scouts and it puzzled the bluff, good-hearted man that somehow or other his son never seemed to make the grade. No one seemed to want him. “They had his number,” was the laconic way Tom Slade put it.

Mr. Bulton believed in scouting and it is true that he had given a considerable sum in the scout drive. But this had not helped his son. At last he had fallen back on the almighty dollar to help this bullying, bragging son of his. He had told Charlie that he would give a hundred dollars to the patrol that he, Charlie, should grace with his membership. And that he would give Charlie a new bicycle. He was a better sport than his son.

Charlie did not care anything about the scouts and as for Pee-wee, “why he was a mere kid,”—and so on, and so on. But he wanted a bicycle. And he was so false in his dealings with his father that he would let that hearty, self-made, generous man invest a hundred dollars in scouting just so that this bicycle might be won. Charlie would not remain in the scouts—only long enough to get the bicycle.

So it was not only his bullying spirit which had prompted him to menace and ridicule the Liventi boys. He was piqued that Pee-wee had not opened the way for him to join a patrol for convenience’ sake. He wished to join that budding patrol and then ride out of it on his bicycle. Thus the Chipmunks would be of some use after all. He had hoped that Pee-wee would invite him, then when Pee-wee had not, he had (like the vulgar bully that he was) taken it out, as they say, on the poor Liventi boys.

After that he decided to pocket his pride and make a direct proposition to the “Harris kid.” If the mountain will not go to Mahomet (as the saying is) why, then Mahomet would go to the mountain. Though, to be sure, Pee-wee was not much as a mountain....