“I—I bet it’s a dandy play,” Pee-wee said; “I’m going to see it when it comes out.”
“Too bad it can’t end with a picture of boy scouts on the trail of a rag dummy. The play might be called The Ragtime Scouts,” Harry said.
I said, “Yes, and who was the first one to say that was Pee-wee.”
“Guilty,” Harry said; “but yet I was right; I said there was no life in that figure, and there isn’t. Shall we take our friend along with us? It seems kind of cruel to leave him here at the mercy of wind and storm.”
“Sure, take him,” I said; “we’ll put him in the Raven Patrol; they’re a lot of dead ones.”
Harry slung Mr. Ragtime (that’s what we called him) over his shoulder and we started back along the trail. On account of being wet, that dummy was heavier and it hung limp and looked even more like a real soldier than it did before, I guess. It seemed awful funny for Harry to be marching along ahead of us with that thing over his shoulder.
That trail ran along close under the cliff and showed us an easy way up. Pretty soon we hit into the road and passed the place where we had supposed Pee-wee had fallen, and then came to the auto. Grove had the fire burning on the edge of the road right near the car, and he was sitting there keeping warm when we came along.
Harry said, “We’ve brought with us one of the most famous movie stars, the Hon. Ragtime Sandbanks; allow us to introduce him. He’s full of stuff that isn’t worth anything, like most movie plays. Just the kind of hero that you kids are fond of clapping your hands at. If they’d only take a few more of those celebrated movie stars and chuck them off a cliff, it would be a good thing. Well, Grove, old boy, you been lonesome waiting? Here old Ragtime, dry your clothes out if you want to ride with us.”
“How are we going to ride without any juice?[[1]]” Grove wanted to know.
“We’re not,” Harry said; “who wants to volunteer to go to Lurin? That’s the nearest town, I think. Take the old battery in and see if you can get another one. I don’t see there’s anything else we can do.”