Girls -- Fiction; Harpeth Valley (Tenn.) -- Fiction
But as fast as I tried to go, I met an interruption on the way up
Providence Road, that was agreeable although detaining from duty. Tony
and Pink and Sam stopped me and told me that they were just on their
way to bring me to the Crotch, and that I would be the first strange
person that had ever seen it, since they had fixed it up in the
Luttrell barn loft to have Scout meetings in. Mr. Douglass had planned
and helped them with it, and they said there never was such a place of
interest in Byrdsville. The reason they were going to show me was that
I must get the empty room over the garage Father has turned the old
family stable of the Byrds into, to make a wigwam for the Paleface
Patrol to have meetings and keep things in. They had asked Mamie Sue
to go with me because it would take two girls to remember all they
saw, and that would be the last time we could come there, though they
would come often to the Wigwam if we wanted them to show us how to be
as scouty as possible.
Just then Mamie Sue came up, and she either snorted with indignation
or choked with candy, I cannot tell which; but because we had to, we
accepted their kind invitation with gratitude. We stopped at the house
first and told Mrs. Luttrell we were going to the barn with the boys,
and she said not to get hurt or fall, and gave us a tea-cake all
around. Mamie Sue held the plate and happened to get two, not at all
by intention, for they were stuck together.
Tony swung up from the horse trough to the loft by a pole, while Sam
and Pink stayed to push us up. I went up just as easily as Tony did,
before they had time to push me one inch, but poor Mamie Sue stuck
halfway through the trap-door and we thought we would never be able to
get her either up or down without calling out the fire-company, as Sam
suggested; but she kept astonishingly cool herself and wiggled in just
the way Tony told her to, and at last got up. She said she knew that
she could fall down all right, when the time came to go, so for us not
to worry about that, and we proceeded to enjoy the Crotch.
I never dreamed boys could get together so many remarkable things and
make it so interesting to tell about them. The big kettle to boil
water and the poles and the sticks and the blankets and tin cups and
plates were in one corner and a shelf held the knapsacks with the
"first aid" things in the opposite corner. All of Sam's bird-eggs, the
collection of which he had seen the error of, and had to give up when
he became a Scout, was on a table by the window, and his butterflies
were pinned on large pieces of brown paper on the wall and looked like
a beautiful decoration.
And while we looked at the things it had taken the boys so long to
collect, I rejoiced that I could manage to spend a lot of money to fix
up the Wigwam, and told them about each thing that I could buy, as I
thought it up, from seeing something that they had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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