Pee-wee Harris on the Trail

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

"It's a search-light," she said. But to them it had no meaning. A merry party returning home in the wee hours paused and watched it curiously but it spoke to them not. At Knapp's Crossroads they saw it, just as the harvest festival was breaking up, and Hank Sparker and Sophia Coyson lingered on their way home to watch it. But it spoke not their language.

Did it speak to any one, this voice calling in the dark? Did any one understand it? Were there no telegraph operators in any of the stations along the line? They would understand. Was there no one?

No one?...

CHAPTER XIX

PAGE TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FOUR

If Pee-wee had stolen a glimpse from under the buffalo robe at about the time that he was writing under difficulties his momentous message to the world, he might have noticed a little old-fashioned house nestling among the trees along the roadside.

At that time the house was dark save for a lamp-light in a little window up under the eaves. Little the speeding hero knew that up in that tiny room there sat a boy engrossed with the only scout companion that he knew, and that was the scout handbook. It had come to him by mail a few days before.

This boy lived with his widowed mother, Mrs. Mehetable Piper. His name was Peter, but whether he was descended from the renowned Peter Piper who picked a peck of pickled peppers, the present chronicler does not know. At the time in question he was eating the handbook alive. The speeding auto passed, the mighty Bridgeboro scout pinned his missive to his remnant of sandwich and hurled it out into the dark world, the boy up in the little room went on reading with hungry eyes, and that is all there was to that.

Peter belonged to no troop, for in that lonely country there was no troop to belong to. He had no scoutmaster, no one to track and stalk and go camping with, no one to jolly him as Pee-wee had. Away off in National Headquarters he was registered as a pioneer scout. He had his certificate, he had his handbook, that is all. It is said in that book that a scout is a brother to every other scout, but this scout's brothers were very far away and he had never seen any of them. He wondered what they looked like in their trim khaki attire. He could hardly hope to see them, but he did dare to hope that somehow or other he might strike up a correspondence with one of them. He had heard of pioneer scouts doing that.

In his loneliness he pictured scouts seated around a camp-fire telling yarns. He knew that sometimes these wonderful and fortunate beings with badges up and down their arms went tracking in pairs, that there was chumming in the patrols. He might sometime or other induce Abner Corning to become a pioneer scout and chum with him. But this seemed a Utopian vision for Abner lived seven miles away and had hip disease and lived in a wheel-chair.