“You make me sick!” shouted Pee-wee.
“There was a big scratch on his knee,” Roy continued. “There was a hole in his stocking—about as big as a seventy-five cent piece. He looked about but could not find the piece of stocking the size of a seventy-five cent piece that had come out of the hole. Where was it? The hole was there—the whole hole; but where was the part of the stocking that had been in the hole? He looked about.”
“Topple him over backwards, will you!” called Pee-wee, in a disgusted appeal to Roy’s nearest neighbor.
“He looked about some more. Then he sat up. Then he sat down. He was a scout—he was resourceful. He happened to remember that once he had eaten a doughnut. The doughnut had a hole in it. The hole disappeared. He said to himself——”
But he was not allowed to go further, for somebody inverted him according to Pee-wee’s suggestion, and when the general laugh had subsided a boy who had said very little spoke up, half laughing but evidently in earnest and greatly interested in Roy.
“While we were rowing across the lake,” he said, “you made some remark about your motor-boat being overcrowded on the trip up and I got an idea from some things that were said that two or three of you came up here alone last year. It struck me that you might have had some interesting experiences from the way you spoke. I wanted to go with your friends off to that hill, but I didn’t just like to ask——”
“That’s the trouble with him,” a smaller boy beside him, who was evidently his friend, piped up. “He doesn’t like to butt in—gee, you’d never think he was a hero from the way he acts—or the way he talks either.”
The older boy took the general laugh good-naturedly. “I was just wondering,” he said, “if you wouldn’t tell us something about your trip.”
“He’s had a lot of adventures, too,” piped up the smaller boy, “and saved people’s lives—and things—and won plaudits——”
“Won what?” someone queried.