“We mean a good deal more than what we say,” I said; “that’s a good suggestion of Pee-wee’s and I say let’s follow it. No troop shall leave Temple Camp on account of a house. If they come along the road they shall not pass. We’ll put them in the house and send them back. We defy everything and everybody. What do we care about the housing shortage?”
Warde said, “Well then, keep still a minute and let me talk to the man.” He has a lot of sense, Warde has, I’m glad I’m not him.
He said, “Hey, mister, we’re boy scouts and we belong at Temple Camp that’s over there in the woods near Black Lake. This road goes around through Hink’s Junction and around through Pine Hollow to the camp. We were going to take the short cut through the woods but we followed this house instead. So now we think we’d like to buy it and we’ll take it to Temple Camp.”
“We’ll take turns carrying it,” Garry said.
Warde said, “Will you keep still so he’ll know we’re in earnest?”
“It’s a business proposition,” Pee-wee said; “shut up and let Warde talk.”
Then Warde said, just as if he really meant it, he said, “We’d like to buy this portable garage if you’ll sell it to us and take it to Temple Camp. We’ll get you out of the ditch all right when the jitney bus comes along. How much do you want for it?”
The man said he was carting it to Pine Hollow because a farmer there said he would buy it. But he said if we really meant that we wanted it he’d sell it for fifty dollars. He said we’d have to pay him ten dollars more for hauling because Temple Camp was farther than Pine Hollow.
“The house will have a good home as long as it lives,” Bert said. “There are plenty of fresh milk and eggs and everything at Temple Camp.” The man said he guessed there were plenty of fresh scouts there too, if the rest of them were like us. He said he didn’t care much about the garage anyway and he was only taking it away because the land where he lived had been sold and nobody wanted it in Gooseberry Centre.
I said, “Maybe they don’t know there are such things as automobiles.”