“Good night!” Pee-wee shouted, “I see your finish.”
Well, pretty soon everybody was shouting at the same time and Pee-wee was dancing around, saying we were all crazy. Most of the Raven Patrol were with him and they ought to be called the Raving Patrol, believe me.
Then Mr. Ellsworth held up his hand in that quiet way he has. “This sounds like the Western Front or a Bolsheviki meeting,” he said, “and I’m afraid our young Raven, Mr. Pee-wee Harris, will presently explode and that would be an unpleasant episode for any book.”
“Good night!” I said. “Don’t want any of my books to end with an explosion.”
Then he said how it would be a good idea for me to write up our adventures and how he’d help me whenever I got stuck and how he guessed the author of Tom Slade would put in fancy touches for me, because he lives in our town and he’s a whole lot interested in our troop. He said that breezes and distant views and twilights and things aren’t so hard when you get used to them and even storms and hurricanes are easy if you only know how. He said girls aren’t so easy to manage though.
“I’ll help you out with the girls,” Pee-wee said; “I know all about girls. And I’ll help you with the names of the chapters, too.”
“All right,” Mr. Ellsworth said, “I think Pee-wee will prove a valuable collaborator.”
“A which?” Pee-wee said, kind of frightened.
So then we all laughed and Mr. Ellsworth said it was getting late and we’d better settle about collecting books for the soldiers.
We decided that after we got to camp I’d begin writing up our adventures on the trip, but we couldn’t decide how we’d all go in our boat, and that was the thing that troubled us a lot, because the fellows in our troop always hang together and we didn’t like the idea of being separated.