"Is he ready?" Grace Bentley asked.
"A scout is always ready," Westy told her; "that's his middle name."
"And we're not going to let him row, either," Pug Peters said.
"Aren't you afraid he'll get dizzy?" I said. "Remember his little head is full of recipes; two heaping teaspoonfuls to a half cup of milk——"
"Never you mind, Walter," she called to Pee-wee (because that's his real name), "you just get right in."
Oh, boy! Laugh! I just sat down on the bank and began to roar. Pee-wee didn't care anything about rowing. He didn't care about anything, I guess. He was in a state of cromo, or whatever you call it. He just got in and sat down in the stern seat as if he was going to be executed.
"Aren't you going to show them how to row?" Connie called out, as the girls stood up in the boat, each with an oar, trying to push off.
But Pee-wee wasn't going to show them anything.
"We'll show him we can do something," they said.
Pretty soon they got off and the last we saw of Pee-wee he was sitting like a nice little boy scout in the stern of the boat. Every time the boat swerved around in a circle, we could see his face, all sober and scowling. The boat went every which way, one girl giving a long pull and the other breaking her stroke and almost losing her oar. But what cared they, yo, ho? Sometimes the boat seemed to be coming back to us, and then we could see Scout Harris sitting there with his knees together, looking fierce and terrible, like Billikins with a grouch. The rowing wasn't much of a joke to him.