“That’s just what I said,” Pee-wee told her; “you should worry about how we did it. Didn’t we prevent the burglars from going away with those things? Sure we did. Because we went away in their car. See?”
Then Harry said, smiling in that nice way he has; he said, “It was just one of those happy little errors that only scouts know how to commit, Mrs. West.” Then he told her just how it was, and she said it was, you know, some kind of a word—providential. That means lucky.
“Oh, and father will give you five hundred dollars just as he said,” Elsa West spoke up, “and you deserve it.”
“We foiled them,” Pee-wee said.
“Indeed you foiled them,” Mrs. West told him, smiling all the while; “and you’re going to stay and have some refreshments and wait for the judge to come home. He’ll be so glad to see you, and he’ll give you a check, just as he said.”
“How about that, Pee-wee?” Harry said. “We shouldn’t want to make any more mistakes, eh?”
Gee whiz, I knew that Scout Harris wouldn’t make any mistake about that, anyway. Trust him for that.
“That’s one thing about scouts that you don’t know about,” he said, “because anyway, they can’t do that on account of a rule. They can’t take a reward for—of course, I don’t mean they can’t—— Now, if somebody happened to give a scout a—say a piece of pie—that would be all right. If it’s just kind of—you know—something to eat—but I mean money.”
Mrs. West said, “You shall have a whole pie all to yourself. I’m glad that there is no rule against that, at least. While you’re eating it, you can tell us all about the scouts, because I’m very interested.”
“So am I,” said Elsa; “so you must all come in the dining-room this instant so we can serve you all, and if you’re real scouts, you can prove it by showing us that you have appetites, and Mr. Harris can give us a lecture.”