Aunt Sophia did not want to try it, but she was presently to be shaken up in quite another way. Gazing with increasing severity through her spectacles she saw sprawled upon the page the dreadful words.
If any hop-toad can’t learn the pace he has to have his legs tied together for an hour.
Every feller that gets a new hop-toad gets a piece of chocolate—
If a hop-toad can’t croak like a frog he has to be turned over on his back and somebody sit on him till he croaks.
Aunt Sophia looked up, dumbfounded, speechless. She readjusted her spectacles, as if even they might be deceiving her, and read:
A hop-toad has to be given to the tom-cats—
She read no more. Rather she saw the page in a kind of trance. Her astonished eyes jumped from one blood-curdling memorandum to another, picking out the more heartless words and phrases. Given to the tom-cats ... chased the Robins away ... turned on his back till he croaks ... hop-toads ... sticks in their mouths....
Horrors, oh horrors! Here before her very eyes was a series of recipes for cruelty! Directions, suggestions, memorandums written in cold blood for the torture of hop-toads!
Pee-wee sensed the situation, but it was too late. The hop-toads were already on their backs, the sticks were in their mouths, they were croaking, or being fed alive to tom-cats, the robins had been chased from their nests and their little ones, the boys were standing around eating chocolate while the toads suffered, the massacre was on.
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Pee-wee said, facing the awful face of his outraged aunt. “You see hop-toads, they’re really not hop-toads; do you see?”
“I do not see,” said Aunt Sophia.
“I’ll tell you all about it. Scout patrols are named after animals; there’s a patrol at Temple Camp named the Robins, see? My new patrol is going to be named the Hop-toads, because they’re all going to be good at scout pace, see? Gee whiz, you don’t care if we make fellers hold sticks in their mouths, do you? Because they can run better that way. A hop-toad means a—a scout. I’m a hop-toad. Maybe I don’t look like one but I am.”