CHAPTER XXXII—WE HIT THE TRAIL
I guess we were all pretty excited on account of at last being right up in the neighborhood of that treasure, and near the very place where the train with that old car of ours was held up.
Anyway, you would have said we meant business if you had see Pee-wee unloading the auto in that shed behind the stationery store. Brent’s car was in there, too. Our young hero had two shovels and a pickaxe and a couple of big burlap bags, and he looked like a striking miner as he trudged up the road with all that junk over his shoulders. Pretty soon we took some of the things from him. But he kept the rolling-pin and a big saucepan; hanged if I know what the saucepan was for.
We had a couple of scout belt-axes along, but no camping stuff, because we hadn’t thought that we’d stay up there very long.
Pretty soon we hit into the railroad tracks and followed them north. I guess the people who saw us thought we were crazy. Harry said Pee-wee looked like Don Quixote, with all that junk hanging from him.
Harry said, “It will be easy to find Brent’s sign and to follow his blazing in the woods, but how are we going to find out where the hold-up occurred? That’s the question.”
“We’re going to hunt for a tree like the one we have a description of,” Grove said.
“That seems about the only thing to do,” Harry said; “the tracks aren’t going to tell us anything.”
Steuben Junction was in a kind of opening in the woods; it was like a little village in a clearing, sort of. Part of those woods we had come through in the auto. In the part where the tracks ran north of the village the woods were awful thick and were right up close to the tracks on both sides. It was a single track road.
We knew that Brent didn’t know anything except just what we had told him about that big balsam poplar, and we thought that he wouldn’t have bothered his head about that in looking for a good place to camp. We thought he’d just wait for us.
When we had gone a little distance from the village, we divided into two parties, and each kept in the woods a little way off from the tracks, one party on the west side and the other party on the east side.
Harry said, “Well, there’s one good sign and that is that none of the trees in this woods are poplars, except a few dead ones. What we have to do is to hunt for a big, tall, husky stranger. That old giant of the north doesn’t die as easily as most of the poplar family.”
“That’s a good name for it,” I said; “the Giant of the North.”
“Maybe even if one grew it would be dead by now,” Grove said.
“Even still we might find it,” Harry said.
“Would it stand up if it got dead?” Skinny wanted to know.
“If there’s one here it won’t be dead,” Harry said; “he’s a pretty old customer, that tree; old ‘Rough and Ready.’ Only it’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”
Grove said, “I wish we could reduce the area of search.” Isn’t that a peach of a sentence? Believe me, he’s some highbrow, Grove is.
All of a sudden, Pee-wee stopped short. Gee whiz, I thought he had found the treasure.
“Break it to us gently,” I said.
“I know how to reduce the area of search!” he shouted.
“All right, go ahead and reduce it,” Harry told him.
“Listen—all listen!” the kid said. “I have a—you know—one of those things——”
“An inspiration?” Grove asked him.
“We don’t need to hunt on both sides of the track,” the kid shouted, “because I can do a deduction—a good one. Do you remember that bullet hole in the side of the car? If the bullet came through there and hit that man Thor, then he must have been riding with the seat frontways, and if that seat was frontways on a train going south, it means he must have been on the left side of the car. We don’t need to bother about looking in the woods on the other side of the track at all. All come over on this side. I reduced the airplane of search—I mean the area.”
For about half a minute, Harry just stood there thinking, and then he said, “I’m hanged if you’re not right, Pee-wee. How did you happen to evolve that in your noodle? You’re a bully little scout.” Then he said, “I’ve often noticed that if a fellow is a scout, he’s a scout more than he is anything else. He may be a motor-boatist or a motorist or a tennis player, he may be a catcher or a pitcher or a sodalogist——”
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“An ice-cream soda specialist,” he said. “But when it comes to a showdown, a scout is just a scout and that’s all there is to it. Am I right?”
“Thou never spakest a truer word,” I told him. “Being a scout is like a 1916 Ford—you never can get rid of it.”
“That’s the idea,” Harry said; “a scout’s a scout and there you are.”
“He’s a friend to everything that lives,” little Alf sang out; “it says so in the book.”
“That’s what he is, Alf,” Harry said.
So then we all kept to the one side of the track, and we were saved a lot of trouble by Pee-wee’s deduction. The kid is sure great on deduction—and movies. And his favorite hero is apple pie. Gee williger, I guess we could pretty near feed Austria with the war tax he pays down at the Lyric Theatre. Harry says if Pee-wee were to stop eating, the price of everything would go down. Anyway, he controls the wheat market—eating nine wheat cakes at a sitting. But he’s great on deduction.
One thing, Harry was sure right when he said that when it comes to a showdown a scout is a scout—I have to admit it. Anyway, it seemed kind of natural like, to be walking through those woods; it seemed just like at Temple Camp. You wouldn’t have known there was a village within a couple of hundred miles. Gee, I’m not saying anything against the Cadillac, but I like to hike; I’d rather hike than ride in a machine. I guess that’s because I’m a scout, hey? Especially I like hiking through the woods. Sitting on a porch, that’s one thing I hate. I hate algebra, too. My father says it’s good to know algebra, even if you don’t want to be especially good friends with it. I’ll let it alone if it’ll let me alone—that’s what I told him. Anyway, it was dandy in those Woods.