So then I rounded up my army of invasion and I shouted, "Scouts and sprouts, I have squinted yonder tree with my trusty right eye and I find we have to cross neutral territory again. We have to go through that house over there----" "The one with the roof of----" Pee-wee shouted. I said, "That's the one, the one with the roof. Take a good look at that house; you'll see it has an inside as well as an outside." "I can't see the inside," Dorry shouted. "Can you see the outside?" I asked him. "Well, the inside is just inside of the outside. If you took the outside away there wouldn't be any inside. You can do that by algebra." I said, "There are two stories in that house and we have to put some adventure into those stories." Pee-wee shouted, "I'll go ahead and ring the bell and tell them we want to go through, hey? Because I know what to say." Then he said to the girls, "You can watch me if you want to. Maybe some time you'll be on a bee-line hike and want to go through a house and then you'll know just how to do." One of them said, "Oh, thank you so much." "The pleasure is ours," I told her. "If the civilized population wants to follow us, what do we care?" Then I said, "Ready--_go_!" We all marched across the green with Pee-wee ahead of us and those girls coming along behind, laughing. You couldn't blame them because the kid looked awful funny--very brave and bold. We all stopped on the walk in front of the house. It was a dandy big house; it looked like one of those houses that has a hall running straight through to the back. That's the kind of neutral territory I like. The kid marched straight up to the steps and up onto the porch and pushed the button. "That's one thing you have to learn when you're a scout," he called down, "not to be afraid." All of a sudden the front door opened and, _g-o-o-d night, magnolia_! There was the biggest colored man I ever saw. He was about six feet tall and eight feet in circumference, or maybe it was the other way round, I don't know which. His face was so black that it would make a blackboard look pale. You could have written on that man's face with chalk, dandy. He had on a kind of a uniform with brass buttons and his elbows stuck out on each side of him. "Good night," Hunt said; "that's one mountain we didn't figure on." I said, "I guess that's one of the Black Hills. I wonder how it got out of my geography." Pee-wee looked like a kewpie doll in front of that man. The man just glared at him and then he said, good and loud, "Whatchue want here, you?" Pee-wee said, "We--eh--we--does Mr. Smith live here--please?" The big man said, "No, he don't. Whatchue want here?" He just glared down at the poor kid as if he were going to eat him. Pee-wee said, kind of hesitating, "If--if we'd be willing to wipe our feet--maybe--would you be willing to let us go through this house--maybe?"