CHAPTER XI—WE MEET AGAIN
That’s always the way it is with our young hero, Scout Harris. He never hits what he aims at, but he always hits something. If he loses his way, he has an adventure. If he falls down, he finds a penny while he’s on the ground. If he should be blown up by dynamite, he’d land in the ball-field and save his fifty cents admission. You can’t beat him.
So now he began shouting, “Now you see, I brought you to the very fellows you were talking about. Do you mean to tell me that long lost friends aren’t better than eats?”
All I could say was, “Pee-wee, you win.”
Harry Donnelle couldn’t say anything, he just sat down on a rock and laughed and laughed. “Brent,” he said, “this is the Honorable Scout Harris, our young hero, who was leading us to a sumptuous repast in the solemn woods. But this is something better than we expected.”
And you can bet it was! There was Brent Gaylong and little Willie Wide-Awake and the rest of the Church Mice—six of them altogether. Oh boy, it was good to see them.
As soon as we introduced Grove and Pee-wee and little Alf to them, Harry said, “And what in the dickens are you doing here, you old Calamity Jane? The last time we had the bad luck to run into you and your traveling kindergarten you were in hard luck—no scoutmaster, no friends,——”
“Oh, we’re rolling in wealth now,” Brent said; “I mean we’re rolling in our flivver—latest model, self-stopper and everything. We don’t speak to common scouts like you any more. We’re on a trip—a series of trips—we left Newburgh this morning, and we’ve had four trips so far. I hope we don’t get tripped again. Remember how we were out for adventure? Well, now we have it. If you want adventure, get a flivver.”
“Where are you going?” Harry asked him.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “Can’t you see we’re not going. The only kind of treatment we haven’t given this machine is asperin. Anybody got an asperin tablet? We won this machine for putting out a fire in Newburgh. We had it wished on us. I’m sorry we put the fire out—it was a nice fire.”
I said, “Brent, you crazy Indian, you sound just the same as last year. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I couldn’t even change a dollar,” he said.
“Well, this is some streak of luck anyway,” Harry said. “We’ve got a 1920 Cadillac stalled down in the village. We’re on our way to search for buried treasure—up near Lake Ontario. We think we’ve got a clew to a couple of bags of gold. Want to join us? At present, we’re starving. You haven’t got such a thing as a cheese sandwich loafing around, have you?”
“The last cheese sandwich I saw was on its way down little Bill’s throat,” he said, “but we have some cold corned beef, and crackers and rye bread, and a few other odds and ends that you’re welcome to. What do you say we make a camp?”
So we all went into the woods and got a fire started just for old time’s sake, and sprawled around it and had some eats. Believe me, it seemed good to be with those fellows again. Brent said that wherever we went, they would go too. He said they were on a vacation and they didn’t care what happened to them. He said that if he could only make one stab for buried treasure, he would feel that he hadn’t lived in vain. That was always the way he talked—crazy like.