“It was so dark,” said Artie; “it was a kind of a pinkish brown.”
The meeting had now resolved itself into a “social” which was the way that meetings in the lecture room usually ended and the three scouts were the “lions” of the occasion. The great actor and friend of animals was the hero of the evening and ate four plates of ice cream and a couple of dozen cookies to show his sympathy for “dumb creatures.” His tender heart beat joyfully (on his left side) and so overcome was he that his eyes filled with tears when he ate a stuffed green pepper. There seemed no danger of Aunt Sophia learning the terrible truth about her nephew and, with her baleful influence removed, the social end of the meeting became a real scout affair.
“The trouble with you girls is you don’t think of anything but animals,” Artie said. “If you were real scouts you’d have seen that the tree in that picture wasn’t a real tree and that the stable was only painted.”
“That’s deduction,” Pee-wee interrupted loudly, as he wrestled with a mouthful of cake; “that shows you’re not real scouts, because real scouts know everything, I don’t mean everything but they know all about trees and things as well as animals and you can be cruel to trees and that shows you’re a regular scout—”
“By being cruel to them?” Prudence laughed.
“There are other things in scouting besides animals,” Grove said. “Don’t get off the track when you start to be scouts—”
“Lots of times I got off the track,” Pee-wee said.
“Sure,” said Artie, “and every scout isn’t an aviator because he goes up in the air.”
“I’ve been up in the air a lot of times,” Pee-wee persisted.
“Sure, he’s a regular elevator,” said Artie.