"Keep those things off me!" the victim shouted as the boxes and cans piled up on him. "Do you think I'm a freight car?" "As he stooped to pick up a box a can went rolling under Blythe's makeshift bed. As he reached for the can a bag of beans burst like a sky-rocket, pouring a shower down his neck and into his pockets and over the floor. "_Now you see!_" he yelled. "The eggs are sliding down!" "_Help, help!_" called several scouts. Pee-wee picked up two cans of sardines and sacrificed a bag of rice. He gathered up rice and beans together, and a jar of jam went rolling on a career of foreign travel. All was confusion. "_Time!_" he screamed. "He asks for an armistice," Roy shouted. "You mean a couple of dozen arms," Westy shrieked. "If you put another thing on me I'll drop the eggs," Pee-wee screamed. "I'll drop them so that they--they--_bounce_, too." This threat of frightfulness cowered his assailants. "That's against international law," Roy shouted. "I don't care, I'll do it!" Pee-wee yelled. "You pile one more thing on me and I'll--" "Start an eggmarine campaign," Westy said. "That's the first time I ever knew food to get the best of Pee-wee," Artie Van Arlen observed. The diminutive mascot of the Raven Patrol having valiantly protected the eggs in one extended hand gradually divested himself of the mountain under which he had labored, and by a fine strategic move took a tactical position behind these defenses with the pasteboard box of eggs upraised in heroic and threatening defiance. The war had come to an end suddenly, like the World War. "Unconditional surrender," Roy shouted. "Do I get three helpings of stew for supper?" demanded the victor, by way of imposing an indemnity before he proceeded with disarmament. "Sure, eggs won the war," Roy conceded. As for Blythe, he was sitting on a grocery box in No Man's Land, laughing so hard that his sides ached. Their banter seemed a kind of tonic to him. And it was when he laughed and seemed so simple and childlike and so much one of them, that they found him so likable. CHAPTER IX AROUND THE FIRE After this decisive conflict the period of reconstruction or rather the period of demolition, began auspiciously. It began with a grand feast cooked out-of-doors in the brass kettle which was the pride of Roy's life. That brass kettle stood upon a scout fireplace of stones, and from its interior a hunter's stew diffused its luscious fragrance to those who sat about, feeding the companionable fire. The scouts were quite masters of the situation, their coming must have been like a freshening breeze to the lonely visitant at the old deserted camp, and their fun and brisk efficiency and readiness seemed to give him a new life and afford him amusement which was expressed in that silent, likeable, yet haunting smile. It was not often that he laughed aloud and he talked but little, and then with a kind of diffidence that seemed odd in one so much their senior.