When Pee-wee stood upon the ground he was exactly four feet and three-sixteenths of an inch high, but when he went up in the air his greatness baffles description. When in scout negligee he always wore his sleeves rolled up which somehow bespoke his terrible combativeness. When he wore his jacket a score of merit badges were displayed instead of his bare arms. These were interspersed with campaign and advertising buttons. Upon the front of his scout hat was a lone button as large as a fifty-cent piece, advising the beholder to use Rizeman’s Yeast. Perhaps this was the secret of Pee-wee’s going up in the air so readily.
Need I conclude this faithful description by saying that Pee-wee was an all-around scout of the first class? When he held up his right hand with the three middle fingers extended, they reminded him of the three helpings of dessert which he often had at Temple Camp, and he remembered the twelve good scout laws because they were an even dozen like ten cents’ worth of licorice jawbreakers.
So there he sat upon the railing of his porch looking over the camping hints in the scout handbook and eating gum-drops. Suddenly he dropped a gum-drop, a black one, and as he slid down from the railing in quest of it in the flower-bed below, his handbook slipped out of his other hand and fell among the bushes.
He first recovered the black gum-drop, and having dusted it off, placed it where it would never again go down except inside him. Then he lifted the handbook and casually noticed that it had fallen open at pages four hundred and four and four hundred and five. These were in the section describing scout games, and, as Pee-wee glanced half-interestedly at the headings, his idle gaze was arrested by a particular heading and he read the paragraph which followed it:
RELAY RACE
One patrol pitted against another to see who can get a message sent a long distance in shortest time by means of relay of runners (or cyclists). The patrol is ordered out to send in three successive notes or tokens (such as sprigs of certain plants) from a point, say, two miles distant or more. The leader in taking his patrol out to the spot drops scouts at convenient distances, who will then act as runners from one post to the next and back. If relays are posted in pairs, messages can be passed both ways.
Suddenly, with a wild hallo, he announced to the world at large, “I’ve got an inspiration! I’ve got an inspiration! I’m glad I dropped that gum-drop, because I’ve got an inspiration! I know what I’m going to do! I’ve got a peach of an idea! Oh, boy, I know what I’m going to do!”
He did not know what he was going to do, far from it. But he knew what he thought he was going to do.
“I’m going to—I’m going to start something!” he said in the full exuberance of his new idea.
Never in all his life did Scout Harris, Alligator, formerly Raven and Pollywog, say a truer word. He was certainly going to start something.