Mr. Abbington and all the rest of those people looked at us kids awful anxious, sort of. Gee, it made me feel sorry for them. All of a sudden Pee-wee piped up. He said, “Camp-fires aren’t the principal things in scouting; good turns come first. Anyway, once I heard that actors always help each other and maybe, kind of, you might say we’re actors, because sometimes we give shows.”
Mr. Abbington said, “I am delighted to hear that, my young friend. Let me ask you what you have played.”
“He plays the harmonica when nobody stops him,” Westy said.
I said, “Oh, sure, he’s a peachy actor; he plays dominoes and tennis and tiddle-de-winks. The most stirring part he ever plays is when he stirs his coffee.”
Miss Le Farge said to another one of those ladies, “Oh, isn’t he just too cute?”
So then we helped them get all their stuff into the van. They had a tent and a lot of other things. Harry whispered to me that he guessed they hadn’t had any supper and he said he was afraid if we didn’t give them something to eat the man that played the slave driver wouldn’t have strength enough to whip Uncle Tom the next afternoon. Brent said maybe even Uncle Tom wouldn’t have strength enough to stand up and be whipped. He said, “We’d better feed them up.”
So we made a fire in the grove right alongside the road so as not to interfere with Miss De Voil, who was lying on one of the mattresses in the van. We told the ladies that they could have the van all to themselves that night so they could get good and rested. I fried some bacon for them and heated some beans and we got water out of the railroad station.
Gee whiz, the water was the only thing about that railroad that was running.
VIII—GRUMPY
We ran the cars all that night so as to get those people to Grumpy’s Cross-roads in the morning. The ladies slept in the van, all except one; she was the one that played Aunt Ophelia. In the play she had to be strict, like a school teacher kind of, with Topsy. But when she wasn’t in the play she was awful nice. She sat up all night in Rossie Bent’s car, because she said she liked the fresh air. Mr. Abbington and Harry sat together outside the van. I didn’t get sleepy much. The rest of the fellows sprawled in Tom Slade’s car and Brent Gaylong’s car, and were dead to the world. It was nice traveling in the night only we had to go slow. We went across a kind of a prairie and every once in a while we came to farms. It was dandy to see the sun come up in the morning.