“It’s usually there,” Bert said.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Pee-wee said to his new member; “they’ve been acting like that all day. They’ve been going around and around and around like a chicken with its head off. Hervey Willetts and Roy Blakeley are the worst of the lot.”
“Sure, we’re each worse than the other if not more so,” I said. “The question is, where do we go from here?”
“We go straight west to Temple Camp,” Pee-wee shouted; “we’re not going to, what d’you call it, deviate.”
“Call it whatever you want, I don’t care,” I said.
“And we’re going to go pretty soon, too,” the kid said; “we’re going to go while the column of smoke from the cooking shack is still going up. We can’t see the sun any more; we haven’t got anything to follow but the smoke.”
“Wrong the first time,” I said. “We’ve got Hervey Willetts to follow. I’d rather follow him than the sun; the sun always goes to the same place; he goes every which way. There’s no pep to the sun. Is there, Scout Cook?”
I guess the poor little kid thought we were a pack of lunatics. He didn’t know what to say.
“What time did you leave camp?” I asked him.
He said, “About one o’clock; just after the bus came with a lot of new scouts. There’s a big troop coming to-night and Uncle Jeb has got to send them to Bear Mountain Camp because there aren’t any more tents or cabins to put them in. I’d rather stay at Temple Camp, wouldn’t you?”