One of the men said to him, “You just wait for the sixteen reel picture to be released next fall, The Daredevil of the Cumberland Hills. Do you see that place up there? Where there’s a rock sticking out? He leaps with sublime abandon across that—”
“Is she the heroine?” Pee-wee piped up.
“Good night!” I said. “Excuse me while I faint.” Dub and Sandy both started laughing. And Bunk what’s-his-name started rolling on the ground, laughing too. Sublime abandon. Oh boy!
“You think you’re so smart laughing,” Pee-wee said to the boy hero. “Just because you get a lot of money and have your picture in the papers and all that and you think you can jolly Boy Scouts that find kidnapped children I can prove it by a scoutmaster—”
“Zip goes the fillum,” one of the young men said.
“I bet if you really did jump across there in the picture it was only a rag dummy—I bet it only looked as if you did. Because anyway William S. Hart is so smart with pistols, a bandit took five hundred dollars away from him. And I know a Scout that doubled for a feller like you that has a crazy name and gets a lot of money because people are fools.”
One of the young men kind of winked at young Bravado or whatever his name was, and he said, “Will you take that from a Boy Scout, Dan Daraway? Call his bluff! Show him what’s what in the movies. Don’t let him get away with it that you ever had anybody double for you. Why remember in the Demon of the Deep how you dived to the bottom of the ocean? These Scouts are a bunch of false alarms. Give him a call, for the honor of our profession—the second biggest industry in the United States!”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Even Pee-wee was kind of flabbergasted.
One of those young men said, “We’ve had enough knocks about the movies. Now the Boy Scouts are jumping down our throats. Well here’s a good chance to test it out between the Boy Bluffs of America and the second largest industry in the United States. What do you say, Reckless?”
The boy wonder—gee he seemed to have all kinds of names—he got up slowly and brushed some grass off him and he said, “Come ahead, Boy Scout. Put up or shut up. I’ll give you one that will make your hair curl.”