First, Harry asked if the telegraph office was open, but it wasn’t open. The reason was, because there wasn’t any there. If that place had been a little smaller we might have run over it without seeing it and punctured one of our tires.
Then Brent said, “Well then, you don’t happen to have a nice hill handy, do you? We’ll return it in good condition when we get through with it.”
They didn’t happen to have any hills in that village—they were out of most everything. Brent said he guessed hills were hard to get. So we started off again and hit into the road that went to Grumpy’s Cross-roads. Gee whiz, if Major Grumpy’s temper was anything like that road, good night! That was what we all said. But we should worry about the road as long as we had all our plans made. Harry said the Kluck car could eat up the miles all right, but, oh, Sister Anne, if one of them tried eating the miles on that road it would have indigestion, all right. Even Pee-wee couldn’t have eaten those.
After we had gone maybe about nine or ten miles we came to a dandy; it was a kind of a young mountain. Now, on the way along, we had been making up a message that we would send by smudge signal, because we thought that if those other scouts got it, it would be a feather in their cap and we were thinking about them more than we were about ourselves. Because a scout is brother to every other scout, see?
So this is the smudge signal that we decided to send, and, good night, little we knew what it would lead to. Pretty soon you’ll see the plot beginning to get thicker.
Uncle Tom show will be given as announced.
Deny rumors to contrary.
Boy Scouts of America.
Brent said, “If those kids are up as early as old what’s-his-name said they were, they ought to see a smudge signal up on the top of a hill like this, and they can notify old Grump. Then later we’ll give him the knockout blow. He’ll look like a pancake when we get through with him.”
That started Pee-wee off—the word pancake. “We’ll go riding into the village, and we’ll kind of have our clothes torn, and we’ll look all what-d’ye-call-it—weary and footsore—and we’ll have all the Uncle Tom’s Cabin company sitting in the touring cars,” he said, “and we’ll have a big sign that says Boy Scouts on the Job, hey? And maybe we’ll give a parade.”