Townsend fished around in the coffee-pot with a lead pencil and pronounced it free of other contents. They drank their coffee, one out of a collapsible metal cup, the other out of an empty mustard can. Coffee is very good in such receptacles. It should never be sipped from a respectable breakfast cup, never. But if you use a mustard can be sure that there are no pieces of chalk or crayon in it. These things are good in tracking and blazing, but not in coffee.
That morning, Pee-wee tried his hand at griddle-cakes, while his patrol leader gazed wistfully on. They were not half bad. And when you come right down to it, coffee out of tin cans, and griddle-cakes not too delicate, form a toothsome repast on a dull, rainy morning, when the drops patter down on your cosy little shelter and the little fire burns merrily outside, and the landscape is hazy and you have no forks or spoons. If you go to having forks and spoons you will spoil it all.
Pee-wee and Townsend watched the chipmunk.
CHAPTER XIII
A SCOUT IS POLITE
They liked it so much lolling under their little tent in the rain that they lingered there till noon-time. The water trickled down the little knoll and they were as dry as if surrounded by an elaborate drain ditch. It is fascinating doing nothing and just watching the rain; that is, it is when you are camping and in no particular hurry.
Their talk was as it should have been, aimless, bantering, idle. They told Ford jokes by the dozen. Pee-wee told about Temple Camp. They discussed the great relay race.
For fully half an hour they watched a beetle trying to climb up a wet, slippery leaf. They watched this beetle and found it diverting. They stood an olive bottle some yards from their shelter and, sitting in the doorway of the tent, threw pebbles at it. They counted the drops that fell slowly, one after another, from a limb.
Oh, the things they did were very important. They put a griddle-cake directly under the dropping point to see if in time the drops would bore a hole through it. But a chipmunk came and took the griddle-cake and they watched him eat it.