CHAPTER XVII—WE LET OUR YOUNG HERO DO THE TALKING
Gee whiz, I had to laugh; there stood Pee-wee with his arms around the big bowl and the other things piled inside it, away up to his neck. He looked awful funny.
“You leave it to me,” he said; “I know how to talk to a judge, because my father knows a man whose brother was a judge.”
“Trust us,” Harry told him; “we won’t say a word.”
“You have to handle judges a special way,” our young hero said.
Pretty soon the door opened, and there stood a girl about—oh, I don’t know, I guess she was about sixteen.
“Here’s your stuff,” Pee-wee said; “we brought it back to you.” And he marched into the house with the rest of us after him. “Where shall I put it down?” he asked her.
Even the girl couldn’t help laughing, the kid looked so funny. Then she began wringing her hands, kind of happy like (you know the way they do), and shouted, “Mother! Oh, Mother! Come down! Everything is here, they’ve brought it back!”
Her mother came downstairs all excited, and I guess she must have thought it was kind of funny, too, to see us all standing around, and the punch bowl, with everything piled inside it, on a table, and Pee-wee standing right beside it like a guard.
She said, “Oh, Constable! How did you do it? How can we ever thank you? You don’t mean that these boys—stole——”
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout it, Miss West,” he said; “it seems these here youngsters recovered it. I don’t know what sort of clew they worked on. Looks as if they was pretty clever, I got to admit. Looks like some p-u-r-t-y shrewd de-tective work, I got to allow.”
Then Harry spoke up and said, “Mrs. West and Miss West, it is the privilege of the Boy Scouts to restore your valuable property which was stolen. Doubtless you have heard of the Miracle Man; allow me to introduce him, Mr. Walter Harris, known far and wide as Pee-wee the Sleuth. Tell them, Walter, of how we got on the trail of this treasure, of the clews we followed, and of how you ferreted out the secret of where the valuables lay hidden. It is really a wonderful story, Mrs. West.”
“Oh do tell us,” the girl began crying; “I know you’re just wonderful—Mr. Harris.”
All the while, Pee-wee was shifting from one foot to another and scowling at Harry, and looking uncomfortable.
“Scouts seldom go wrong, Miss West,” Harry said to the girl; “even in the darkness of night, they cannot be foiled. Their senses are so highly developed, and they are so alert, that missing a train, for instance, or getting onto the wrong train, are things unknown to them. A scout is unerring. He can even identify a tree among thousands of other trees, in the dense forest——”
“Isn’t that perfectly wonderful!” Elsa West said.
All the while, Pee-wee was wriggling his neck in his collar and shifting from one foot to another and trying to catch Harry’s eye.
“The manner in which these young scouts were able to recover your valuables, Mrs. West,” Harry went on, very sober in that funny way of his, “is truly remarkable. I was not with them when they discovered the first clew—I think it was a shock absorber; was it not, Walter? But I am glad that I can share in the honor which is his—and theirs. The Boy Scouts are nothing less than wonderful, Mrs. West. Their great accuracy of vision—— But I will let the Miracle Man tell you in his own words. Come Pee-wee.”
I think Pee-wee would have killed Harry Donnelle if he had had him alone. He just stood there, scowling and shifting, and then he began.
He said, “Well, I’ll tell you how it is about the Boy Scouts. They make some dandy mistakes. Other fellers don’t make such good mistakes—see? You have to admit that there are good mistakes, don’t you?”
“Oh, positively,” Harry said.
Mrs. West whispered to her daughter, “Isn’t he too cute?”
“Some of the worst things that ever happened are good, aren’t they?” the kid went on. I could hardly keep a straight face. “Suppose a house burns down. That isn’t good is it?”
“We follow you,” Harry said.
“But if somebody gets rescued, that’s good.”
“Oh, it’s splendid,” Elsa West said.
“Even if you get into the wrong automobile it might be good,” our young hero said. “Maybe, kind of, there might be times when the wrong thing is better than the right one. That doesn’t stop anybody from being a hero, does it?”
Harry said, “Not at all.”
“Well then,” Pee-wee said, “do you know Shakespeare?”
“I never met him,” Harry said.
“Don’t you know he’s dead?” the kid shouted.
“I didn’t even know he was sick,” Harry came back.
“He was smarter than you are,” the kid hollered at him, “and he said, ‘All’s well that ends well’ because it’s in my copy book. That means it’s good to make a mistake, if you can do a good turn. See? What’s the difference between two Cadillacs? Even suppose we got into the wrong one and drove away and then found——”
By now everybody there was laughing and Mrs. West kept whispering to her daughter that Pee-wee was “excruciating” and “just too cute.” I guess they were beginning to see how it was.
“There’s your valuable stuff,” the kid said; “that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”
Mrs. West was awful nice. She said, “Indeed it’s the main thing, and how can we ever thank you? But tell us all about how it happened. I don’t care anything about mistakes or accidents. You’ve brought us back our things—and it’s wonderful.”
“That’s just what I said,” Pee-wee told her; “you should worry about how we did it. Didn’t we prevent the burglars from going away with those things? Sure we did. Because we went away in their car. See?”
Then Harry said, smiling in that nice way he has; he said, “It was just one of those happy little errors that only scouts know how to commit, Mrs. West.” Then he told her just how it was, and she said it was, you know, some kind of a word—providential. That means lucky.
“Oh, and father will give you five hundred dollars just as he said,” Elsa West spoke up, “and you deserve it.”
“We foiled them,” Pee-wee said.
“Indeed you foiled them,” Mrs. West told him, smiling all the while; “and you’re going to stay and have some refreshments and wait for the judge to come home. He’ll be so glad to see you, and he’ll give you a check, just as he said.”
“How about that, Pee-wee?” Harry said. “We shouldn’t want to make any more mistakes, eh?”
Gee whiz, I knew that Scout Harris wouldn’t make any mistake about that, anyway. Trust him for that.
“That’s one thing about scouts that you don’t know about,” he said, “because anyway, they can’t do that on account of a rule. They can’t take a reward for—of course, I don’t mean they can’t—— Now, if somebody happened to give a scout a—say a piece of pie—that would be all right. If it’s just kind of—you know—something to eat—but I mean money.”
Mrs. West said, “You shall have a whole pie all to yourself. I’m glad that there is no rule against that, at least. While you’re eating it, you can tell us all about the scouts, because I’m very interested.”
“So am I,” said Elsa; “so you must all come in the dining-room this instant so we can serve you all, and if you’re real scouts, you can prove it by showing us that you have appetites, and Mr. Harris can give us a lecture.”
Oh, boy! Believe me, Mr. Harris gave them more than a lecture. He gave them a demonstration.