CHAPTER XII—THE GRAND DRIVE BEGINS
The next minute that girl started talking Italian to Tony, and, oh, boy, you should have seen him. Right away he got excited and wanted to dig up the whole earth. I guess she told him there was a gold mine where his wagon had been standing.
I don’t know if you know much about mushrooms, but they’re easy to raise and you can get a lot of money for them, and that’s something that most scouts don’t know about. All you need is a place that’s kind of damp and dark, like under a car or a wagon or in a cellar that hasn’t got any heat. It’s a lot of fun raising them. Maybe that’s why they call them fungi. Anyway, Minerva Skybrow put the fun in fungi for us all right, because now we have a dandy little mushroom patch under our car down by the river and the only competition we have in Bridgeboro is from Tony. We should worry.
Every Saturday morning people come down to Van Schlessenhoff’s field to buy mushrooms from us. Only you’ve got to be careful, because if you eat the wrong kind of mushrooms, the first thing you know some fine day you’ll wake up and find yourself dead. So you better read what the handbook says about them.
The kind we raise are dandy big ones and we call them the Skybrow mushroom, and they’re known far and wide—all the way up as far as Main Street.
Now for the rest of that afternoon we helped Tony dig up mushrooms and plant them in boxes and spread more of them in the space where his wagon belonged, and Minerva Skybrow managed the whole business. I guess it must have been after six o’clock when we heard the milk train whistling, and, believe me, we were all pretty tired when it pulled into the station.
Minerva said, “Now isn’t that better than just eating? You’ve won the day, you’ve kept the tracks clear, and you’ve done something worth while. You’ve done a good turn in the bargain.”
“And when we start raising mushrooms ourselves,” Pee-wee piped up, “we’ll have something more to eat, too. Hey?” Jiminy, that’s all that kid thinks about.
I said to Minerva, “You’re so smart, maybe you can think of a way for us to get past Slausen’s Repair Shop. Believe me, that’s going to be some Hindenburg line. Maybe we can tell him to plant rubber bands and automobile tires will grow up. We should worry; we’ve done enough for one day.”
Mr. Jenson, who is engineer on that milk train, was mighty nice. He said that scouts did him a good turn once, and so he was going to pay them back. While the men were loading the milk cans onto the train he ran his locomotive very slowly onto those old rusty tracks and the first thing we knew, plunk, he bunked right into our old car. Gee whiz, it looked good to see it move. It just gave a kind of a jerk.
Then he called down to us and said, “Now where do you want me to leave this de luxe Pullman Palace car?”
I said, “We want you to push it across Main Street, past where the lunch wagon usually stands, and right about to the middle of the field. That’s as far as we can go to-day.”
“You planning to go farther than that?” he asked us.
“Yes, but we have to think of a way,” Westy called up to him.
Mr. Jenson began laughing and he said, “You kids’ll have to do some tall thinking to get past that old building.”
“That’s all right,” Westy said; “the human mind can move anything.”
Mr. Jenson just said, “All right, over she goes.”
Some of us got on the car and the others walked along and the girls stayed around, laughing. A couple of them got on the car, but most of them were kind of afraid, I guess. Maybe they thought it would never stop. Some men stood around watching and laughing, too. What did we care?
The locomotive pushed the car so slow that we could walk ahead of it. It hardly moved. We felt pretty important when we saw the gates go down across Main Street and people and automobiles waiting till we got past. Most of the scouts who had come from other towns had gone home and only our own troop and the girls and a few others were there. But a whole lot of people were standing around watching and laughing at our old ramshackle car. It went right over Tony’s new mushroom farm, and then Mr. Jenson’s fireman came down and we helped him haul a big piece of timber across the tracks about in the middle of the field, because the brakes on that car weren’t much good.
Pretty soon the locomotive stopped and our old car just moved so slow that it hardly moved at all. Then, kerplunk, the wheels ran against the piece of timber, and the first stage of our what-d’you-call-it, memorable journey, was over.
After that we helped Tony get his lunch wagon back to where it belonged, and we all gave Mr. Jenson three cheers when the milk train pulled out. The boy scouts are all right, and you can see for yourself that you can do a lot by concerted appetite. But you need brains, too. And if it hadn’t been for the Girl Scouts and the Erie Railroad, where would we be, I’d like to know? So that’s why my favorite heroes are the Girl Scouts and the Erie Railroad. Maybe they’re both kind of slow—I’m not saying—but good turns are what count.