PEE-WEE GOES TO IT

It was not until afterward that Hope realized the full significance of Pee-wee’s act. When she saw her mother embrace and kiss him (much to Pee-wee’s discomfort) and heard the comments of the household generally, it struck her that she had been rescued from a horrible death, like a girl in a story. The one false note in the whole business was that her hero was not tall and commanding, like some of the college boys she knew at home. Then she could have regarded him with romantic tenderness.

Farmer Goodale, somewhat doubtful about the affair, made a trip to the scene of Pee-wee’s triumph and his inspection only increased the little scout’s glory. He said that the reptile was a rattlesnake, sure enough, and a very formidable one. Simon Hasbrook, the farm-boy, also made a pilgrimage to the historic field of glory, and reported that the dead snake was the largest he had ever seen.

As for Pee-wee, his exploit was soon relegated to the back of his seething mind in the interest of more important conquests. For he intended to triumph over Straw-hat Braggen as he had triumphed over the snake. He intended to vanquish him, not with a mop and a cudgel, but with a float which would be a vision of splendor.

His first move was against Mr. Goodale. “If we have a float in the parade,” he said excitedly, “it’ll make lots and lots of people come and board here, because it pays to advertise, and all we have to do is kind of to drop that building down onto the hay wagon and then decorate it; see? All we have to do is to saw off the four stilts and let it down—kerflop. It’ll come down all right.”

Mr. Goodale agreed that if the four stilts were sawed off the structure would undoubtedly descend upon the hay wagon.

“On account of the attraction of gravity,” Pee-wee said. “Then when we’re all through with it we can sort of raise it up again, because then we’ll have plenty of money on account of the farm getting to be so popular, so it’s a kind of an investment. So will you do it? If you’ll help me saw it off I’ll do all the rest, and I can even print a great big sign, because I know all about printing, because my uncle is in the printing business. So will you do it?”

“I don’t see how as it’s goin’ ter bring folks here,” drawled Mr. Goodale, good-humoredly, and somewhat captivated in spite of himself, by Pee-wee’s enthusiasm; “because all the folks up ter Snailsdale hev got boardin’ places—”

“Yes, but when they see our float they’ll want to come here; you leave it to me because I took a snapshot of all the fellers eating up at Temple Camp and I made them all smile as if they were getting two or three helpings, and the trustees put that picture in a circular, so that proves it, because the next summer scouts came all the way from Arizona. Gee whiz, that’s why nobody comes here, because we don’t advertise. Lots of rich people go to the Snailsdale House.”

“Waal,” smiled Farmer Goodale, by no means convinced, but quite unable to withstand the fire of Pee-wee’s enthusiasm, “we’ll see what can be done—”

“And can Simon go, and drive the oxen?” Pee-wee interrupted, excitedly, anxious to bring Mr. Goodale to the point of unconditional surrender. “And can I use the red paint that’s out in the barn?”

“Haow’d you find out ’baout that?”

“I saw it there, and can I use a couple of those boards out in the pigpen?” Evidently Pee-wee had made a preliminary inventory of the entire farm.

In plain truth neither Mr. Goodale nor any one else had any faith in the practical character of Pee-wee’s enterprise. But if our hero paused to consider this lack of spirit and cooperation he probably consoled himself with the reflection that all great inventors and promoters are scorned by the world until their triumphs have been won. In Pee-wee’s mammoth enterprises he was not unaccustomed to working alone. The well-known case of Christopher Columbus was always in his mind.

Farmer Goodale and his wife had too long prayed and hoped for summer boarders at their sequestered homestead to believe that a boy scout could perform the miracle of bringing any trunk and suitcase pilgrims to their door. Three years previously they had advertised in the New York Sunday papers and in the vacation book published by the railroad. They had even taken down the partition between the two sitting rooms to make a spacious floor for dancing. But no one had ever come, save an occasional old lady, or a weary school teacher. Mrs. Goodale said it was because her husband had an old-fashioned habit of telling the truth about his lonely place.

At all events the kind-hearted old man wished those who did come to be contented and happy. So after contemplating the old corn-husk house shrewdly from various angles, he piled timbers between it and the hay wagon until the space of a foot or more was filled. Then he sawed through the four supporting stilts and by pulling the timbers out one after another, let the ramshackle old structure down upon the wide, clumsy hay wagon.

“There yer be,” he said, as he proceeded to nail it here and there and to bind it with rope to the frame of the wagon; “naow I reckon she’ll do. More like a float fer a insane asylum, I’d say. Naow you can set ter work and kill time puttin’ on yer gewgaws n’ Simon’ll go ’long with yer when th’ day comes. Anything else?” He stood, saw in hand, looking over the top of his old steel-rimmed specks, a shrewd, amused smile on his furrowed, bronzed face. “Naow yer kin go to it, as the feller says.”

So Pee-wee went to it. The architectural conception, which was now an accomplished fact, was ludicrous in the last degree. The old, slatted corn-husk receptacle standing upon the hay wagon looked like nothing either Gothic or Moorish. Mrs. Stillmore said it was roorish, a name derived from rural. The structure, which was of a familiar sort seen on farms, slanted out from its base till it reached the point of juncture with a roof disproportionately massive and heavy. The sides of the structure had slats instead of siding so that the whole business had not a little the appearance of a rolling circus cage.

It was this fact that put it into Pee-wee’s fertile brain to use a pig or a calf as a tenant of this traveling cell by way of suggesting the bounteous fare at Goodale Manor Farm. He deferred this matter till later, pending the completion of his exterior decorations.

After the first curiosity of the household had been satisfied no one visited him in his corner of the barnyard and the work of gala preparation went forward without audience, save for a rooster that made a practice of sitting on the fence and watching the artistic labor. Perhaps he had an artistic bent. At all events, he sat on the fence hour in and hour out contemplating the work with profoundest interest.

He was Pee-wee’s only companion.