Warde said, “Those are harsh words, Scout Harris.”
The kid looked awful funny sitting there in the boat after the rest of us got out. He just sat there with a terrible scowl on his face, and his face was all grimy on account of falling in at the outlet. He was good and mad.
The rest of us were standing on the shore watching him and we were just going to start up the daffodil trail (that’s what Warde called it) and turn to the left when all of a sudden we heard the sound of merry laughter echoing through the woods. My sister wrote that sentence about merry laughter echoing through the woods. I was going to write that we heard a couple of girls giggling somewhere around, I should worry, and that’s the end of this chapter.
CHAPTER X
THE PLOT GROWS THICKER—THE MUD TOO
Now there’s one thing about Pee-wee, he always dresses up when there are going to be girls. He wears all his merit badges and his belt-axe so they’ll know he’s a real hero. He’s the only original boy scout heart-breaker. Girls always smile at him. Sometimes they even laugh out loud.
So as soon as he heard the merry sound of girlish laughter in the neighboring woodland (my sister wrote that) he began to listen and then he grabbed the rag in the bottom of the boat so as to wash the dirt from his face.
I guess he was going to dip it in the water when all of a sudden, good night, there were a couple of girls coming out through the bushes. They were laughing kind of just as if they had been spying on us, but all of a sudden they set up a howl and the next thing I saw there was Pee-wee jumping around in the boat and the boat was rocking about half full of water. One of his legs was outside, and he didn’t seem to know whether to stay in the boat or get out of it. Gee whiz, it wouldn’t have made much difference because there was just about as much water inside as there was outside.
“Oh, he pulled the plug out—the rag!” one of the girls said. “Isn’t that too funny!”
“It shows you don’t know what funny means,” Pee-wee spluttered.
By that time the boat was more than half full and he was flopping around in the water outside it. One good thing, the water was shallow but the bottom was all mud and he was floundering around in it and lifting one leg after the other high up trying to walk up on shore. The water was too shallow to swim in and too deep to walk in especially on account of the muddy bottom. Pretty soon he was on shore all covered with mud, and the rest of us were all standing around screaming.