Pee-Wee Harris | Page 8

generously; "they're smarter than skunks
and even skunks are smarter than I am."
"I like you better than skunks," she said. Wiggle seemed to be of the
same opinion. "I like all the scouts on account of you," she said.
No one could be long in Pee-Wee's company without hearing about the
scouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping)
advertisement of the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking and
stalking and signaling and the miracles of cookery which his friend
Roy Blakeley had performed.
"Can he cook better than you?" Pepsy wanted to know, a bit dubiously.
"Yes, but I can eat more than he can," Pee-Wee said. And that seemed
to relieve her.
"I can make a locust come to me," he added, and suiting the action to
the word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded
locust to his very hand. At such wonder-working she could only gape
and stare. Wiggle appeared to claim the locust as a souvenir of the
scout's magic.
"You let it go, Wiggle," Pee-Wee said. "If you want to be a scout you
can't kill anything that doesn't do any harm. But you can kill snakes and
mosquitoes if you want to." Evidently it was the dream of Wiggle's life
to be a scout for he released the locust to Pee-Wee, wagging his tail
frantically.
"You have to be loyal, too," the young propagandist said; "that's a rule.
You have to be helpful and think up ways to help people. No matter

what happens you have to be loyal."
"Do you have to be loyal to orphan homes?" Pepsy wanted to know. "If
they lick you do you have to be loyal to them?"
Here was a poser for the scout. But being small Pee-Wee was able to
wriggle out of almost anything. "You have to be loyal where loyalty is
due," he said. "That's what the rule says; it's Rule Two. But, anyway,
there's another rule and that's Rule Seven and it says you have to be
kind. You can't be kind licking people, that's one sure thing. So it's a
technicality that you don't have to be loyal to an orphan home. You can
ask any lawyer because that's what you call logic."
"Deadwood Gamely's father is a lawyer," Pepsy said, "and I hate
Deadwood Gamely and I wouldn't go to his house to ask his father.
He's a smarty and I hit him with a tomato. Have I got a right to do
that--if he's a smarty?"
Here was another legal technicality, but Pee-Wee was equal to the
occasion. "A--a scout has to be a--he has to have a good aim," he said.
CHAPTER VII
A BIG IDEA
They had been driving the cows home during this learned exposition on
scouting. Two things were now perfectly clear to Pepsy's simple mind.
One, that she would be loyal at any cost, loyal to her new friend, and
through him to all the scouts. She knew them only through him. They
were a race of wonder-workers away off in the surging metropolis of
Bridgeboro. She could not aspire to be one of them, but she could be
loyal, she could "stick up" for them.
The other matter which was now settled, once and for all, was that it
was all right to throw a tomato at a person you hated provided only that
you hit the mark. Aunt Jamsiah had been all wrong in her anger at that
exploit which had stirred the village. For to throw a tomato at the son
of Lawyer Gamely was aiming very high.

The son of Lawyer Gamely had a Ford and worked in the bank at
Baxter City and was a mighty sport who wore white collars and red ties
and said that "Everdoze was asleep and didn't have brains enough to lie
down," and all such stuff.
Pee-Wee let down the bars while the patient cows waited, and Scout
Wiggle (knowing that a scout should be helpful) gave the last cow a
snip on the leg to help her along.
Here, at these rustic bars, ended Pepsy's chores for the day and in the
delightful interval before supper she and Pee-Wee lolled in the well
house by the roadside. Wiggle, with characteristic indecision, chased
the cows a few yards, returned to his companions, darted off to chase
the cows again, deserted that pastime with erratic suddenness, and
returned again wagging his tail and looking up intently as if to ask,
"What next?" Then he lay down panting. Mr. Ellsworth, Pee-Wee's
scoutmaster, would have said that Wiggle lacked method. ...
"If I had a lot of money," Pepsy said, "you could teach me all the things
that scouts know and I'd pay you ever so much. Once I had forty