Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camps -- Juvenile fiction; Relay racing -- Juvenile fiction
The sun, which had not been out many hours on that memorable day,
withdrew behind the hills, the Italian woman withdrew within her
domicile, the billy goat withdrew to his private suite and was soon
wrapped in slumber. And night cast its shroud over the quiet
countryside.
Pee-wee felt strange and very lonesome. There he was, almost exactly
half-way between Bridgeboro and Temple Camp marooned in a railroad tower
house. To be sure, his situation was not desperate; occasionally an auto
passed along the road, the Italian woman (though apparently not deeply
interested in his adventures) was somewhere within call, and, in any
case, Townsend would either return or send some one. What Pee-wee could
not comprehend was that a perfectly innocent person could be subjected
to the indignity of arrest. Townsend had not been able to show his card,
therefore he had been taken away. The reason had nothing to do with it.
Pee-wee may have heard that the law is blind, but he had never known
that it is deaf, dumb and blind.
There was nothing to do now but wait, so he sat on the low shelf which
had evidently been a sort of desk, dangling his legs. At first he looked
at the pictures in the seven-year-old magazine, but somehow he could not
fix his mind on the pictures and he threw the torn, yellow-leaved
periodical from him.
Moreover, it was rapidly getting too dark to read. He was not exactly
nervous, but he was impatient and anxious. And this feeling increased as
the darkness came on apace.
Across the track were the few deserted houses which had constituted the
village or settlement. He could see them more clearly from the tower
house than he had been able to from the flivver when they had first
approached the spot. And now that he was not preoccupied with the
distant landscape, he noticed more particularly the scene near at hand.
Across the track, and somewhat back from the road was a large wooden
structure, too large for a place of residence. Pee-wee could just make
it out among the trees in the gathering darkness. The thought occurred
to him that this had once been a factory, the closing down of which,
might easily have depopulated the neighborhood. That would account for
the railroad gates at such an out-of-the-way spot. Perhaps, before the
war, or even during the war, streams of workers had flowed to and from
that big structure among the trees.
This supposition of Pee-wee’s was presently confirmed by a new
discovery. Glancing along the track to the east he saw that a branch
track curved around behind the supposed factory. This might have been a
branch of the railroad, but he thought it was more likely to be just a
siding for convenience in shipping goods from the factory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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