Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camps -- Juvenile fiction; Relay racing -- Juvenile fiction
For in planning his famous relay race Pee-wee had neglected to take into
consideration an important element of the scout nature. Relay races are
all right when there is nothing too seductive at the ends of them. In
the case of a relay race ending at a delightful summer camp the danger
of it becoming cumulative is very great.
Having completed his preparations for the reception of his unknown
guest, Pee-wee was seated one evening on the doorstep of Memorial Cabin
communing with nature and eating a luscious tomato. The rays of dying
sunlight painted the hills across the lake a vivid crimson and the
truant streams from his luscious refreshment painted his scout suit an
equally vivid hue. It seemed almost as if the sun were actually setting
in his face in a very riot of colorful glory. Intuition, bolstered by a
series of elaborate deductions, had convinced the lonely tenant of the
cabin that the time of fulfillment was at hand, that his solitary guest
would shortly appear. So strong was this conviction upon Pee-wee that he
had, by the exercise of tremendous will power, refrained from partaking
of his lonely, self-cooked meal, in consideration of the imminent
arrival of his mysterious companion. “I’m going to wait till eleven
o’clock,” he said, referring to his hospitable period of fasting,
“because anyway he ought to be here to-night, that’s the way I figure
it.”
Pee-wee was always quite himself when playing a part, and so far as he
was concerned, there was no living soul in all the country roundabout—no
one but his solitary companion, the last runner to receive his much
handled credential, hastening silently, like some stealthy Indian
emissary, toward his sequestered retreat. Cheerful voices could be heard
down at camp, but Pee-wee heeded them not. The inviting dinner horn
sounded and re-echoed from the hill’s across the darkening lake and for
a moment it tempted him with its suggestions of waffles and honey. But
he put these thoughts out of his mind with the redoubled resolution
that, he, the lonely host of Memorial Cabin, the hospitable hermit and
all that sort of thing, would not mingle with his kind, but remain in
magnificent and romantic isolation in his lair. He had boasted, indeed,
with such flaunting boasts as only he could utter, that neither he nor
his unknown friend would partake of a single meal in camp during the
visitor’s stay but would live like pioneers “on hunters’ stew that we
make ourselves and things like that.”
“I bet the two of you will be down for dinner the second day,” Roy
Blakeley had predicted.
“That shows how much you know about primitive life,” our hero had
thundered.
“It shows how much I know about your hunters’ stew,” Roy had said. “I
bet the two of you will be down for dinner after one grub on the hill.”
“If the stranger is able to walk,” Warde Hollister had said.
“Oh that’s understood,” Roy had agreed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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