THE WAY OF THE SCOUT

Pepsy’s right name was Penelope Pepperall and Aunt Jamsiah had taken her out of the County Home after the fire episode, by way of saving her from the worse influence of a reformatory. She and Uncle Ebenezer had agreed to be responsible for the girl, and Pepsy had spent a year of joyous freedom at the farm marred only by the threat hanging over her that she would be restored to the authorities upon the least suspicion of misconduct.

She had done her work faithfully and become a help and a comfort to her benefactors. She had a snappy temper and a sharp tongue and was, indeed, something of a tomboy. But Aunt Jamsiah, though often annoyed and sometimes chagrined, took a charitable view of these shortcomings and her generous heart was not likely to confound them with genuine misdoing.

So the stern condition of Pepsy’s freedom had become something of a dead letter, except in her own fearful fancy, and particularly when that discordant voice of the bridge spoke ominously of her peril.

Pepsy had been trusted and had proven worthy of the trust. She had never known any mother or father, nor any home save the institution from which Aunt Jamsiah had rescued her, and she had grown to love her kindly guardians and the old farm where she had much work but also much freedom. “Chores will keep her out of mischief,” Aunt Jamsiah had said.

Wiggle’s ancestry and social standing were quite as much a mystery as Pepsy’s; he was not an aristocrat, that is certain, and having no particular chores to do was free to devote his undivided time to mischief; he concentrated on it, as the saying is, and thereby accomplished wonders. He was Pepsy’s steady comrade and the partner of all her adventurous escapades.

Pepsy was not romantic and imaginative; her freckled face and tightly braided red hair and thin legs with wrinkled cotton stockings, protested against that. She had a simple mind with a touch of superstition. It was a kind of morbid dread of the institution she had left which had conjured that ramshackle old bridge up on the highway into an ominous voice of warning. She hated the bridge and dreaded it as a thing haunted.

Pee-wee soon became close friends with these two, and from a rather cautious and defensive beginning Pepsy soon fell victim to the spell of the little scout, as indeed every one else did. Pepsy did not surrender without a struggle. She showed Pee-wee the woodchuck hole and Pee-wee, after a minute’s skillful search, showed her the other hole, or back entrance, under a stone wall.

“There are always two,” he told her, “and one of them is usually under a stone wall. They’re smart, woodchucks are.”

“Are they as smart as you?” she wanted to know.

“Smarter,” Pee-wee admitted, generously; “they’re smarter than skunks and even skunks are smarter than I am.”

“I like you better than skunks,” she said. Wiggle seemed to be of the same opinion. “I like all the scouts on account of you,” she said.

No one could be long in Pee-wee’s company without hearing about the scouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping) advertisement of the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking and stalking and signaling and the miracles of cookery which his friend Roy Blakeley had performed.

“Can he cook better than you?” Pepsy wanted to know, a bit dubiously.

“Yes, but I can eat more than he can,” Pee-wee said. And that seemed to relieve her.

“I can make a locust come to me,” he added, and suiting the action to the word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded locust to his very hand. At such wonder-working she could only gape and stare. Wiggle appeared to claim the locust as a souvenir of the scout’s magic.

“You let it go, Wiggle,” Pee-wee said. “If you want to be a scout you can’t kill anything that doesn’t do any harm. But you can kill snakes and mosquitoes if you want to.” Evidently it was the dream of Wiggle’s life to be a scout for he released the locust to Pee-wee, wagging his tail frantically.

“You have to be loyal, too,” the young propagandist said; “that’s a rule. You have to be helpful and think up ways to help people. No matter what happens you have to be loyal.”

“Do you have to be loyal to orphan homes?” Pepsy wanted to know. “If they lick you do you have to be loyal to them?”

Here was a poser for the scout. But being small Pee-wee was able to wriggle out of almost anything. “You have to be loyal where loyalty is due,” he said. “That’s what the rule says; it’s Rule Two. But, anyway, there’s another rule and that’s Rule Seven and it says you have to be kind. You can’t be kind licking people, that’s one sure thing. So it’s a teckinality that you don’t have to be loyal to an orphan home. You can ask any lawyer because that’s what you call logic.”

“Deadwood Gamely’s father is a lawyer,” Pepsy said, “and I hate Deadwood Gamely and I wouldn’t go to his house to ask his father. He’s a smarty and I hit him with a tomato. Have I got a right to do that—if he’s a smarty?”

Here was another legal technicality, but Pee-wee was equal to the occasion. “A—a scout has to be a—he has to have a good aim,” he said.