“What’s the cricket for?” I asked him. All the while Dub Smedley was laughing.
“That shows how much you don’t know about scouting,” Pee-wee said, good and excited. “That’s named the Chipmunk Scout Emergency Kit, and maybe I’m going to get it patented. It’s a combination windmeter and you can drink out of the tube if you’re famishing and you can use it for a compass too, because if you lay a cricket on the ground he’ll always start going south—”
“Starting for Florida, I guess,” said Dub.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “It’s the most wonderful invention since Luther Burbank invented the shoe-tree.”
All of a sudden Dub said, “That would be a good idea for a crazy hike; we could go whichever way the wind blows.”
“If we do, I’m the one that invented it,” Pee-wee shouted. He meant the hike. You know he’s the one that invented the Boy Scouts of America. I wouldn’t just exactly say he invented the earth, but just the same, he made some wonderful improvements on it.
I said, “That’s a very fine crazy idea; we can hike to the four points of the compass.”
“You mean six points,” Dub said; “north, east, south, west, and hither and thither.”
So then I began to see that he’d be a good one to go on one of my crazy hikes.
I said, “How about yonder? We might go there, too. As long as we have a windmeter we can go everywhere.”