“Sure, and a megaphone is like a magnifying glass only different; it makes your voice bigger. I can make a hoop out of willow and that’s for the big end of the megaphone and then I can fix my shirt to it, all around it like a net that you catch fish with and I can do that with a shoestring and I can pull the shirt to a small opening so it’s just like a funnel and that’s a megaphone. You know my voice, don’t you?”
Simon acknowledged his acquaintance with Pee-wee’s noise.
“You know how loud it is?”
Simon knew.
“Well, I can make it fifteen times as loud and without anything I can shout so they can hear me across Black Lake and that’s a mile wide, and fifteen times a mile is fifteen miles.”
Simon was speechless at the miraculous power of the scouts. A shirt megaphone loomed up in his simple mind as more wonderful than a phonograph or a telephone. He was for going home along the familiar lower road, as it was called, thereby avoiding the precipice near which the upper road ran, but he was so deeply impressed with Pee-wee’s scoutlore that he consented to follow the hill road.
“A fog is always thicker down in a valley,” Pee-wee informed his companion; “that’s because there’s water in valleys. That’s why we’d better go by the hill road.”
“It goes right sheer down from the road in places,” Simon said doubtfully, “and we could never pass a rig on that road. I wouldn’t drive a horse there to-night, not the old man’s horse, leastways. But oxen are different.”
“Sure they’re different,” Pee-wee agreed as if he had had a long experience with them. “And we won’t get in the mud, either, up on the hill road.”
“After the first couple of miles or so it isn’t so bad,” Simon conceded. So they decided in favor of the upper road.