“You can be successful even when you fail,” Pee-wee explained to him. “Now you can see how it’s better that we didn’t win the prize.”
Poor Simon did not exactly see that but in his rustic shyness, he greatly admired Pee-wee’s ready prowess, a prowess that could not be cowed by laughing girls and white flannel suits. He had immensely enjoyed the affray.
“I’ve been in worse battles than that,” Pee-wee said, darkly.
If our hero was indeed lucky, his luck had a strange way of showing itself during the next hour. They traversed the dangerous section of the road, however, without mishap, except that once or twice Pee-wee almost stepped over the precipice. Carrying out his plan of walking beside one of the wheels and holding a stick against the spokes, he was sometimes very near the edge.
Simon wisely drove in as near to the mountainside as he could and there was no room for Pee-wee to walk there. The fence was at the very edge of the cliff and was not a sure support. Once Pee-wee’s foot went over the edge and he caught this rickety fence just in time. He was lucky, then at all events. As an auxiliary safety device he sang uproariously and treated the admiring Simon to a series of imitations of the voices and calls of all the creatures of the animal kingdom. He explained that these were patrol calls. Simon thought that Temple Camp, that mysterious Mecca of scouts, must sound like a hungry menagerie.
Perhaps they were lucky, too, in encountering no vehicles along that narrow, dizzy way.
The fog was so dense that they could not see ten feet ahead, and though Pee-wee’s warning voice was as reliable as the faithful oxen, still the boys both experienced a feeling of relief when they came to the end of the fence and saw the sheer descent easing off into a grassy slope. Somehow the sight of grass was welcome. It seemed to rise up out of nothing, all steaming like a volcano. It was only close beside them that they could see it at all; ahead it faded away in the dense fog bank. Thus the slope beside them seemed to move along with them. The area of it that they could see was covered with spider-webs spread out on the smoking grass like clothes to dry.
“Anyway the worst that can happen now is for us to roll down and that isn’t so bad,” said Pee-wee. “As long as I know I’m on terra cotta I don’t care.” He doubtless meant terra firma.
“That’s Latin for the earth,” he explained.
“We can’t fall off the earth,” said Simon.