“Good night!” I said. “Don’t want any of my books to end with an explosion.”
Then he said how it would be a good idea for me to write up our adventures and how he’d help me whenever I got stuck and how he guessed the author of Tom Slade would put in fancy touches for me, because he lives in our town and he’s a whole lot interested in our troop. He said that breezes and distant views and twilights and things aren’t so hard when you get used to them and even storms and hurricanes are easy if you only know how. He said girls aren’t so easy to manage though.
“I’ll help you out with the girls,” Pee-wee said; “I know all about girls. And I’ll help you with the names of the chapters, too.”
“All right,” Mr. Ellsworth said, “I think Pee-wee will prove a valuable collaborator.”
“A which?” Pee-wee said, kind of frightened.
So then we all laughed and Mr. Ellsworth said it was getting late and we’d better settle about collecting books for the soldiers.
We decided that after we got to camp I’d begin writing up our adventures on the trip, but we couldn’t decide how we’d all go in our boat, and that was the thing that troubled us a lot, because the fellows in our troop always hang together and we didn’t like the idea of being separated.
Well, I guess that’s all there is to tell you about the meeting, and in the next chapter I’m going to tell you all about how we collected the books for the fellows in camp, and how the mystery about the boat was solved. Those are Pee-wee’s words about the _mystery of the boat_. I can’t see that there was any mystery about it, but there was another kind of a mystery, believe me, and that kid was the cause of it. I guess maybe you’ll like the next chapter better than this one.
Now I’m going to tell you about how we collected books for soldiers and especially about Pee-wee’s big stunt.
The next morning we started out and by night we had over five hundred books. Mr. Ellsworth said they were mostly light literature, but if he had only had to carry fifty of them on his shoulder like I did, he’d have thought they were pretty heavy literature, believe _me_.
This is the way we fixed it. The Raving Patrol (that’s Pee-wee’s patrol, you know) used Doctor Harris’s five-passenger Fraud car. It didn’t go very good and Pumpkin Odell (Raven) said he guessed it was because the wheels were tired—that’s a joke. They held up all the houses in Little Valley. That’s about sumpty-seven miles or so from Bridgeboro. They’ve got two stores there and a sign that says “Welcome to Automobilists” and how they’ll be arrested if they don’t obey the speed laws. Welcome to jail—good night!