“That shows how much you know about scouts,” Pee-wee said. “Scouts are supposed to be cautious. If you’re reckless, then you’re not a good scout. See? Maybe I’d like to go back and capture that bandit, but I have to make a sacrifice and not do it. See?”
I said, “Sure, it’s as clear as mud. Let’s sit down here just as if we were going to take a rest; let’s sprawl on the ground just as if we weren’t thinking about that shack at all. Then we can talk about what we’d better do.”
“Maybe the ground is better a little further along,” the kid said.
“This is all right,” Westy said.
So we sat down right in our path and Will Dawson and Dorry Benton started playing mumbly-peg, so that if the man in the shack saw us he wouldn’t be suspicious. Because if he thought we had seen him and were going to tell, he’d probably start running away.
“Don’t look back,” Westy said. “What are we going to do? We can’t capture him ourselves, can we?”
“The only way would be to sprinkle a little salt on him,” Warde Hollister said.
It seemed sort of funny the way that fellow talked because all of us had seen that black face in the shack and a bandit is no joke, especially a negro bandit, but any color is bad enough. Anyway, I was glad to see that Warde was getting crazy like the rest of us. But I didn’t know till another minute how crazy he really was.