Pee-wee Harris on the Trail

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

Peter had a rich uncle who lived in New York and took care of a building and got, oh as much as thirty dollars a week. The next time this rich uncle came to visit he was going to ask him if he had seen any real scouts with khaki suits and jack-knives dangling from their belts and axes hanging on their hips.

Peter experimented with the axe in the woodshed but it was so long that the handle dragged on the ground and he could sit on it. He had likewise pinned a Harding and Coolidge button on his sleeve and pretended it was a signalling badge. A signalling badge! He did not tell his mother what he was pretending for she would not understand. Out in the small barn he had presented himself with this, with much scout ceremony, and he had actually trembled when he told himself (in a man's voice) to "step forward and receive this token...."

The car in which Scout Harris was being carried reached the lake and still Peter Piper poured over his scout handbook by the dim, oily smelling lamp, up in that little room. The two scoutmasters rowed across and were greeted by their noisy troops and still Peter Piper read his book. The scout of scouts, W. Harris of the nifty Bridgeboro outfit, was nearly suffocated, then escaped and stood triumphant over the ruins of the West Ketchem school, and still Peter Piper's smarting eyes were fixed upon that book. They were riveted to page two hundred and eighty-four and he was reading the words "Scouts should thoroughly master these two standard...."

He read it again and again for his strained eyes were blinking and the page seemed all hazy. He paused to rest his eyes, then read on. But he did not turn the page. For an hour his gaze was fixed upon it. Just on that one page....

CHAPTER XX

STOP

Suddenly something, it seemed like a shadow, crossed the window outside. If Peter's little room had been downstairs he might have thought that a spectre of the night was passing. He looked up, startled, dumbfounded. And while he gazed the tall dusky apparition passed back across the window again.

Half frightened and very curious he raised the little sash and looked out. The night was dark but the sky was filled with stars. Not a light of man's making was there in all the country roundabout. He concentrated his gaze along the back road and tried to pick out the spot where Peace-justice Fee's house was, thinking that perhaps some sign thereabout would furnish the key to this ghostly mystery. But there was not the faintest twinkle there, nor any sound of life. Only solemn, unanswering darkness. Somewhere in the woods a solitary screech owl was hooting its discordant song.

"Is--is--anybody here?" Peter asked, his voice shaking. There was no answer, nothing but silent, enveloping darkness.

Peter groped behind him for the old piece of broomstick which propped the window open, and with this in place, he leaned far out and gazed toward the little graveyard where his father and his grandfather and all the simple forbears of the lonely neighborhood had gone to their rest. Not a sound was there in that solemn little acre. He strained his eyes and tried to identify the place by Deacon Small's tall, white tombstone, but he could not make it out.