“What do you want, anyway? One of you fellows was here yesterday. I told him I didn’t want to bother with you.”
“That was my official staff,” I said. “We don’t bother with him either; we carry him as excess baggage. That’s the Japanese junk man. Did you ever hear that song? It’s dedicated to him. We should worry about the scouts. But you see this is the way it is. We’ve got the movie people after us and we can’t get rid of them. They’re trying to stir up a new war here in Bridgeboro after everything is all peaceful again and school is closed. We’re on a bee-line hike to a big tree over on west ridge, and we have to go straight no matter what’s in the way. Gee whiz, it’s not much fun.
“But, anyway, that big fellow thinks if we try to climb across your porch it will be a good idea for you to come out and look very grouchy and try to stop us; maybe you could look that way if you tried to, hey? And then we’ll be very sweet and nice and give you a big hunk of candy and you’ll say the boy scouts are all right and you’d like to join them. Of course you don’t have to really join them. All you have to do is be in the animated news, all the world in pictures, right in the same film with President Harding. Maybe you wouldn’t care to be a movie actor, hey? You should worry, it will soon be over. Mr. Gilligan, he just wants to show how fellows get to be scouts. It’s propaganda. After it’s all over you can go in the house again, and we’ll beat it for the river. You don’t have to really join, it’s only in the picture. See? It won’t be a real chunk of candy we hand you so as to show that we’re kind and generous. It will be a rock. But it will look like candy. It will be rockcandy.”
CHAPTER X
THE BEE-LINE