CHAPTER XXXII—BZZZZZZ
Now you’d better look on the map I made. Maybe it isn’t much good, but it’s better than the map of Europe. Our car was over about in the middle of the Sneezenbunker land. Because we didn’t want to take the reward from the Orphan Home for finding the inventor, my father said we could offer Tony fifty dollars to move his wagon for a little while. Fifty dollars would buy five hundred sandwiches. It would buy a thousand pieces of pie. We didn’t have any trouble with Tony that time.
Now Mr. Jenson moved his locomotive very slowly past where Slausen’s used to stand, and right across Willow Place. It pushed our car ever so little. The brakeman stood on the front platform of our car and stopped it with the brakes. He said they worked pretty good. Then the locomotive pushed the car about a couple of hundred feet so as to give it a good start, and then backed away from it.
We all stood there shouting, “Hurrah!” “All aboard for Van Schlessenhoff’s field!”
The brakeman was the only one on the car. Now this is just exactly what happened. The car moved along into the marsh and pretty soon we could only see the upper part of it on account of the cat-tails. When it got to about the middle of the marsh it stopped. We followed along the tracks and when we got to where the car was, the brakeman said he had slowed it down because the trestle was shaky and he was afraid it would give way. He had slowed the car down too much and it had stopped. He said he was sorry, but he had to go back to his train.
So there was our car, right in the middle of Cat-tail Marsh, with the cat-tails growing up close all around it, and the mosquitoes mobilizing for a grand drive. We knew Mr. Jenson couldn’t help us any more, because that trestle would never hold his big locomotive.
“This is a nice fix we’re in,” Westy said. “We’ll be eaten up here.”
“What do we care?” Pee-wee shouted. As long as there was some question of eats it didn’t make any difference to him where we were.
I said, “I’m not talking about you eating; I’m talking about the mosquitoes. Wait till the sun goes down, there’ll be nothing left of us, if we stay here.”
“Well, let’s be thankful the car didn’t go down, anyway,” one of the fellows said.
“Sure, it might be worse,” another one of them shouted.
I said, “Oh, sure, this is a fine place for a scout headquarters. There’s only one better place that I know of and that’s on top of a volcano.”
“Can we go on top of a volcano?” the inventor wanted to know.
“Not this afternoon,” I told him.
“This is a dickens of a place to spend the summer,” they all began saying. “What are we going to do? We can’t get the car either way now. It might just as well have broken through the trestle and gone down into the marsh. It’s no good to us here.”
“I say let’s leave it here and come on up to Temple Camp,” Hunt Manners said. “We’ve had trouble enough with it. Let it stay here and rot.”
I said, “Don’t let’s get discouraged. Consider the busy little mosquitoes. See how happy they are.”
“Sure,” Westy said; “and so would we be if we were in their shoes.”
“In their shoes?” Pee-wee yelled.
“They ought to wear rubbers down here,” I said. “Let’s have a meeting of the general staff to decide what we’ll do. We’re in the midst of the enemies.”
Dorry Benton said, “I vote that we go inside and shut the doors and the windows. S—lap! There’s one.”
All around we could hear bzzzzzzz, bzzzzz——
I said, “S—lap! There goes another.”
“Bzzzzzz—sl—ap!” Gee whiz, that was all I could hear. We looked like a class in physical training.
“Come on inside,” I said. “This is getting terrible.”
It wasn’t so bad inside with the doors and windows shut. We chased some of them out and killed a lot of others. It was our lives against theirs.
“Don’t give them any quarter,” one fellow shouted.
“Don’t give them even a dime,” I said.
“Don’t give them a cent,” Pee-wee shouted, slapping at them right and left.
Talk about the Huns! Oh, boy!
After a terrible massacre we got most of them out of the car. Then we sat down to talk about what we had better do. We were in a pretty bad fix, that was sure. It looked as if that was the end of our dear old car, anyway for a meeting place in the summer, because we couldn’t stand against an army of several million billions. A scout is brave, but——
It was quite late in the afternoon and we were getting hungry. The mosquitoes had finished their supper. I hope they enjoyed it. Pretty soon it began to rain outside and the wind began to blow. One good thing, it blew the mosquitoes away. That hour or so that we spent in the car behind closed doors is known in scout history as the Siege of Cat-tail Marsh. And, believe me, we didn’t like it very much. I’m not so stuck on history anyway.