“Well, now I have a little scheme,” he said, smiling all the while, “and
perhaps we can hit some sort of a plan. If I can only get you boys out
of the way, away up at camp, I’ll be able to carry on my German
propaganda work.” Then he winked at me and I knew he was kidding
Pee-wee.
Well, believe me, we hit a plan all right; we more than hit it, we gave
it a knockout blow.
All the while we were talking, he was taking us across the lawn till
pretty soon we came to a little patch of woods and as soon as I got a
whiff of those trees, good night, I felt as if I was up at Temple Camp
already. That’s a funny thing about trees—you get to know them and like
them sort of.
Then pretty soon we came to a creek that ran through the woods and I
could see it was deep and all shaded by the trees. Oh, jiminy, it was
fine. And you could hear it ripple too, just like the water of Black
Lake up near Temple Camp. If I was a grown-up author I could write some
dandy stuff about it, because it was all dark and spooky as you might
say, and you could see the trees reflected in it and casting their
something or other—you know what I mean.
“Can you follow a trail?” Mr. Donnelle asked us.
“Trails are our middle names,” I told him, “and I can follow one——”
“Whitherso’er——” Pee-wee began.
“Whither so which?” I said. Because he was trying to talk high brow just
because he knew Mr. Donnelle was an author.
So he led us along a trail that ran along the shore all in and out
through trees, and he said it was all his property. Pretty soon I could
see part of a house through the trees and I thought I’d like to live
there, it was so lonely.
“You mean secluded,” Pee-wee said. Mr. Donnelle smiled and I told him
Pee-wee was a young dictionary—pocket size.
Pretty soon we reached the house and, _good night_, it wasn’t any house
at all; it was a house-boat. And I could see the fixtures for a wireless
on it, only the wires had been taken down.
Then Mr. Donnelle said, “Boys,” he said, “this is my old workshop and I
have spent many happy hours in it. But I don’t use it any more and if
you boys think you could all pile into it, why you are welcome to it for
the summer. It has no power, but perhaps you could tow it behind your
launch. Anyway you may charter it for the large sum of nothing at all,
as a reward for foiling a spy.”
“I—I kind of knew you were not a spy all the time,” said Pee-wee.
Well, I was so flabbergasted that I just couldn’t speak and even Pee-wee
was struck dumb. We just gaped like a couple of idiots, and after a
while I said, “Cracky, it’s too good to be true.”
“So you see what comes from collecting books for soldiers and for
keeping your eyes open,” Mr. Donnelle said; “you have caught a bigger
fish than you thought. Now suppose I show you through the inside.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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