“He pulled the plug out, he pulled the plug out!” one of the girls kept screaming—you know how they do. She said, “I never saw anything so excruciating in all my born days!” The other girl was laughing so hard she couldn’t say a word.
Brent said, “Fair maids, does this boat belong to you?”
One of the girls said, “Yes, does this little boy belong to you? Oh, he’s just too funny for anything! We had a rag stuffed into a hole in the bottom of the boat to keep the water from coming in. We’re camping just above here. Oh, he’s simply covered with mud. You’re simply covered with mud,” she said to Pee-wee.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he spluttered. “I—I found it out as soon as you did.”
Brent said very sober like to the girls, “You should have had two holes in the boat, one for the water to come in through and one for it to go out through; then a rag would not be necessary.”
“It shows how much you know about scouting,” the kid shouted, all the while wiping the mud from his clothes and then transferring it to his face with his hand. “That’s just like girls, stopping a hole up with a rag. That might have happened in the middle of the lake only it didn’t, and I might have been drowned on account of that rag, only I wouldn’t because I know how to swim anyway.”
“Oh, isn’t he just too cute!” one of the girls said.
“And he knows how to swim,” the other said.
I said, “Oh, he’s very smart; he knows more than his teacher, that’s why she asks him so many questions. Even the head of the Board of Education asked him, ‘How are things?’ He didn’t know, he had to ask Pee-wee. His name is Pee-wee for short.”
“He’s certainly short enough,” one of the girls said.