Tom Slade (he works in Temple Camp office) went with us. Before he was grown up he was in the Elk Patrol, but he’s assistant scoutmaster now. He doesn’t say much—he’s like Pee-wee, only different. He started the Elk Patrol, I started the Silver Foxes, and I’ll finish them, too, if they don’t look out. Gee, you can’t keep that bunch quiet. The Silver Fox Patrol is all right, only it hasn’t got any muffler. Mr. MacKeller went with us, too, that night. He’s County Engineer. He’s got dandy apple trees up at his house. He went so he could decide if the track was safe over the marsh. Because, gee whiz, we didn’t want to break down and have our summer home in among a lot of cat-tails. I hate cats anyway. My sister has two of them. We all met Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. MacKeller at the station and then we started following the old track. Some places we could hardly find the rails at all. We didn’t stop at Tony’s because Mr. Ellsworth said buying frankfurters wouldn’t do any good. He said Tony’s wasn’t the worst part of our trouble; he said Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop was worse, because it was a regular building. After we got by Slausen’s, the tracks were buried in the earth across the Sneezenbunker land. Some places they were as deep as an inch under the ground. But where that land began to slant down into the marsh the track came out good and plain. Before it got right into the marsh it ran along on an old kind of rotten trestle, and it ran all the way across the marsh on that. I guess that trestle was about three or four feet above the marsh. It’s there yet, only you can’t see it from the town on account of the high cat-tails all around. That marsh sort of peters out into Van Schlessenhoff’s field, right close to the river, and there the track is flat on the land again and in some places it’s away under the grass. Mr. MacKeller said he didn’t know how we’d get the car over there, but he guessed the trestle across the marsh would hold it all right. He said even if it collapsed there probably wouldn’t be much damage, only the car would be broken and we’d never get it away from there, and if we camped in it we’d be eaten up by mosquitoes. “Good night,” I told him; “if there’s any eating to be done we want to be the ones to do it.” He said that getting Tony’s lunch wagon and Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop out of the way wasn’t the kind of work for an engineer. “That’s a job for a strategist,” he said. Oh, boy, you should have heard Pee-wee shout. “_What did I tell you? What did I tell you?_” he began hollering. Honest, I was afraid he’d tumble off the trestle into the marsh. CHAPTER VI—SCOUT STRATEGY Westy Martin (he’s in my patrol; he’s my special chum), he said, “The only way to do is to go to work systematically.” “Sister what?” Pee-wee shouted. “Systematically,” I told him; “that means without any help from our sisters. Now shut up.”