THE MILKY WAY FALLS DOWN

As a revenge against Hope Stillmore, Pee-wee ate three plates of ice cream. And his partner, ever loyal, did the same. Not only that, but being in the holiday spirit of recklessness, he dropped nickel after nickel in the automatic piano and it played, “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way,” a prophetic piece as they were soon to learn. It played also, “It’s a long way home,” and “Ain’t we got fun?”

When they emerged from their orgy they endeavored to crank and then to spank their motor without success. The familiar expedient of turning the oxens’ tails failing to give a spark they proceeded to the judicious use of bits of hay held temptingly before the beasts, which were evidently not hungry. At last an auto on its way home from the parade effected a successful surprise attack from the rear, and the oxen being thus started were too lazy to stop again.

The weather was now lowering as Simon, wise in such things, had predicted it would be. The sky was overcast again and there was a returning thickness and dulness to the atmosphere. There was no rain, nor even drizzle, but so thick was the mist that many autoists had their lights on and the lights seemed actually to pierce the muggy air. The atmosphere had an odor to it as of stale, cold smoke. The smoke which arose from the chimney of the Commercial Hotel was not clear and well defined but seemed to merge in the heavy, early dusk.

“It’s goin’ ter be thick as butter,” said Simon. “The old man seed this comin’ from yesterday ony he didn’t say nuthin’ along on account uv the parade. The Milky Way’s goin’ ter fall down, that’s what he calls it. We’d better get a start.”

“Gee whiz, we can find the road, can’t we?” said Pee-wee, not in the least concerned. “Do you think I’m scared of a fog?”

“It’s autos we might meet that I’m thinkin’ of,” said Simon. “They ain’t goin’ ter jump over us; leastways I never see one do that. They can’t see ten feet ahead of ’em in the fog. I’m scared of them autos n’ I admit it. We haven’t got any light.” Autos were still strange and fearful things to poor Simon.

“We can make a noise,” Pee-wee said; “noises are as good as lights; look at fog-horns. Do you know how to make a noise without anything to make a noise with, if you’re starving in the woods?”

“Is it a riddle?” Simon asked.

“No, it isn’t a riddle; you can’t make noises with a riddle,” Pee-wee said disdainfully. “You have to use a tin can and a piece of cord.”

“Where do you get the tin can if you haven’t got anything?” Simon asked, with his crude, rural, logic.

“That shows how much you know!” Pee-wee said with blighting scorn. “Every scout that goes camping in the woods has a can of beans or something.”

“If he has a can of beans he isn’t starving,” Simon observed.

“Maybe he had it but he hasn’t got it any more,” Pee-wee fairly sreamed, loud enough to pierce the densest fog. “He couldn’t eat the can, could he? Anyway, I’ve got an inspiration. Do you know what that is?”

“Is it something to make a noise with?”

“It’s something that tells you about something to make a noise with. It’s something that comes into your brain all of a sudden. I can hold a stick against one of the wheels and it’ll make a noise on account of the spokes knocking against it; just like when you pull a stick along a fence. The faster we go the louder it will be. It’s kind of what you call self-adjusting.”

Simon tried this and was so impressed with the riotous din that he abandoned his sensible intention of buying a holiday horn which he might have procured at any store on that gala day. “It makes a racket sure enough,” he admitted.

“I know all the different kinds of noises,” Pee-wee announced. “I can make every kind of a noise. I’ve got a list of all the different kinds of rackets in my scout book. I can use my shirt for a megaphone. Do you know how?”

“What’s a megaphone?” Simon asked.

“Do you know what a magnifying glass is?”

“To make things bigger?”

“Sure, and a megaphone is like a magnifying glass only different; it makes your voice bigger. I can make a hoop out of willow and that’s for the big end of the megaphone and then I can fix my shirt to it, all around it like a net that you catch fish with and I can do that with a shoestring and I can pull the shirt to a small opening so it’s just like a funnel and that’s a megaphone. You know my voice, don’t you?”

Simon acknowledged his acquaintance with Pee-wee’s noise.

“You know how loud it is?”

Simon knew.

“Well, I can make it fifteen times as loud and without anything I can shout so they can hear me across Black Lake and that’s a mile wide, and fifteen times a mile is fifteen miles.”

Simon was speechless at the miraculous power of the scouts. A shirt megaphone loomed up in his simple mind as more wonderful than a phonograph or a telephone. He was for going home along the familiar lower road, as it was called, thereby avoiding the precipice near which the upper road ran, but he was so deeply impressed with Pee-wee’s scoutlore that he consented to follow the hill road.

“A fog is always thicker down in a valley,” Pee-wee informed his companion; “that’s because there’s water in valleys. That’s why we’d better go by the hill road.”

“It goes right sheer down from the road in places,” Simon said doubtfully, “and we could never pass a rig on that road. I wouldn’t drive a horse there to-night, not the old man’s horse, leastways. But oxen are different.”

“Sure they’re different,” Pee-wee agreed as if he had had a long experience with them. “And we won’t get in the mud, either, up on the hill road.”

“After the first couple of miles or so it isn’t so bad,” Simon conceded. So they decided in favor of the upper road.

These two roads ran parallel, speaking generally. The route by the hill road was a little shorter and had that advantage. For a part of the way it ran close to the brow of a cliff, and had that very decided disadvantage. In places the descent was almost precipitous.

The first couple of miles out of Snailsdale Manor the road ran along a narrow shelf about fifty feet above the lowland. Here the wall was sheer both below and above. On the right arose the rugged side of a mountain, on the left nothing but a ramshackle fence separated the road from the ledge. Then a point was reached where this precipitous wall eased off into a descent of about forty-five degrees, and then farther along, the natural embankment petered out altogether and from that point the road was safe and fairly wide.

The lower road, over which the boys had travelled earlier in the day, ran through an area as flat as a pancake. It was a tract of lowland between the hills. Here the fog must have been very thick that afternoon. In places the mud was always thick enough to make travel difficult. As stated, these two roads ran a parallel course, roughly speaking, and were from a mile to two miles apart. The area below was sparsely populated by a colony of small Italian farmers who lived in shanties. The neighborhood was called Venice, or Venus, as pronounced by Mr. Goodale.

Our travelers had to choose between these two routes on that dull, murky, late afternoon, when the whole world seemed fading away in thickening fog. Of course, if Pee-wee could have applied his customary policy he would have returned from the scene of his Waterloo by both roads. But that being impossible, the pair weighed the dangers and advantages one against another, and started home along the upper road. But as it happened Pee-wee used a number of roads in his operations and would have used still more if there had been any.