"Roy."
Pee-wee read it twice over, then he laid it on the locker and sat down and looked at it. Then he picked it up and read it over again. He did not even realize that its discovery among Roy's things would indicate that it had never been sent. Sent or not, it had been written.
So this was the explanation of Roy's invitation that he accompany them on the trip. Mary Temple had asked them to let him go. Yet, despite his present mood, he could not believe that his own patrol leader, Roy Blakeley, could have written this.
"I bet Tom Slade is—I bet he's the cause of it," he said.
He recalled now how he had talked about the trip to Mary Temple and how she had spoken rather mysteriously about the possibility of his going along. So it was she who was his good friend; it was to her he owed the invitation which had come to him with such a fine air of sincerity.
"I always—crinkums, anyway girls always seem to like me, that's one thing," he said. "And—and Roy did, too, before Tom Slade came into the troop."
It was odd how he turned against Tom, making him the scapegoat for Roy's apparent selfishness and hypocrisy.
"They just brought me along for charity, like," he said, "'cause she told them to. Cracky, anyway, I didn't try to make her do that—I didn't."
This revelation in black and white of Roy's real feeling overcame him and as he put the letter back in the book and the book back in the duffel bag, he could scarcely keep his hand from trembling.
"Anyway, I knew it all the time," he said. "I could see it."