II—WHO WE ALL ARE
What do you think my father said? He said he wished he was young enough to go along. Oh, but he’s a peach of a father! So is my mother. My sister Marjorie said she’d like to go too. Harry said that no girls were allowed. He said that girls were supposed to stay home and receive picture post-cards. Gee whiz, I’m sorry for them. I’m glad I’m not a girl. But if I wasn’t a boy I’d like to be a girl.
That night we had our regular troop meeting. Cracky, you can’t get that bunch quiet enough to tell them anything. You know how it sounds in a graveyard? And you know how it sounds in a saw mill? Well, a graveyard sounds like a saw mill compared with the noise at one of our meetings. So I told our scoutmaster, Mr. Ellsworth, that I had something to say and he said they should let me have the chair. Then they began throwing chairs at me. It’s good he didn’t tell them to let me have the floor, or they’d have ripped that up, I suppose.
“I’d like to get your ear,” I shouted.
“You’ll get our goat if you don’t say what you’ve got to say,” Doc Carson yelled.
“I’m trying to say it if I can get your ear,” I said.
“You can have anything except my mouth,” Pee-wee piped up. Good night, he needs that.
Then Mr. Ellsworth got them all quieted down and I told them how Harry Domicile wanted the Silver Fox Patrol (that’s my patrol) to go out west and how he wanted Pee-wee to go too, even though he was one of the raving Ravens. I said the reason he wanted Pee-wee to go was so he could blow up the tires and we wouldn’t have to have any pump. Pee-wee likes auto tires, because they’re the same shape as doughnuts—that’s what I told him.
There’s one good thing about our troop and that is that one patrol never gets jealous of another. If my patrol gets a chance to go somewhere the other fellows don’t get mad, because they get more to eat. Absence makes the dessert last longer. In our troop each patrol does as it pleases—united we stand, divided we sprawl. Each patrol always has more fun than the other patrols. So if everybody has more fun than anybody else, they ought to be satisfied, I should hope. Pee-wee is in the Ravens, because he got wished onto them when the troop started, but he belongs to all three patrols, kind of. That’s because one patrol isn’t big enough for him. He spreads out over three.
So this is the last you’ll see of the Ravens and the Elks in this story. Maybe you’ll say thank goodness for that. They went up to Temple Camp. There were fifty-three troops up there and everybody had more dessert because Pee-wee wasn’t there. So that shows you how my patrol did a good turn for Temple Camp. Gee whiz, you have to remember to do good turns If you’re a scout.