He jumped up on the porch rail right beside us. The others were all right there, squatting on the porch or sitting on the rail. We could see across the river and past the old ramshackle buildings there and right over the village of Little Valley to the ridge. That big tree stood up higher than all the others and it seemed just as if it were all alone off there. I guess it was about one o’clock then.
I said, “We’re going to cook some eats as soon as we get to the river, because we like to eat near where there’s water. Then we’ll have to think how we’ll get across.”
“Did you come straight all the way from your house?” Warde wanted to know.
“Just as straight as we could,” I said. “If we side-stepped anything we didn’t mean to. There’s no use saying you’re going to do a thing, and then kid yourself about it and not do it. Maybe a bee-line hike is kind of crazy, but it’s hard, too. It’s easy to make yourself think the line runs between two houses when it doesn’t. It’s sort of the same when you get to be a scout. It’s like a bee-line hike—sort of.”
We all just sat there and nobody said anything until Westy said, “That’s right.”
“Maybe you don’t understand,” Dorry said.
Warde said, “Yes, I do understand.”
After that nobody said anything, not even Pee-wee, and we just sat there.
“Sure you can go with us,” I told him. “And just as I said, you’ll see we’re kind of crazy. But just the same we don’t sneak around and we don’t turn back; not till we have to, anyway. You can join the scouts just for the fun of it if you want; the same as you can start on a bee-line hike and go zigzagging around the easiest way if you want to. Maybe you don’t understand just exactly what I mean,” I said to him. “Anyway there’s a place to be filled in my patrol.”