Roy Blakeley's Camp on WheelsFitzhugh, Percy Keese
General
Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels
Fitzhugh, Percy Keese
Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction
Pretty soon we could hear him marching back and forth on the roof of the
car, and shouting at the top of his lungs. Even before I got the stove
hot there was a big crowd standing all around outside, laughing.
He kept shouting, "_Here they are! They're all smoking hot! The
celebrated Boy Scout tenderflops! Flopped by the only original Boy Scout
flopper! They're one cent each! Eat one and you'll never eat another--I
mean you'll never eat anything else! O-o-o-o-oh! They're all red hot!
The kind we eat around the camp-fire! Only one cent! None genuine unless
stamped BE PREPARED! The famous scout tenderflops! They melt in your
mouth! They MELT in your MOUTH!_"
"Good night!" I said to the fellows; "listen to him."
By that time I was frying them six at a clip, while Connie and Wig and
Westy were passing them around on pieces of board and scooping in the
money. All of a sudden I heard Pee-wee's voice; it seemed to be in the
stove. I opened the lid and heard him calling down the stovepipe, "Send
me some up here so I can be eating them; it'll make the people hungry."
"That's a good idea," Wig said; "let's all be eating them, and let's
look kind of happy every time we take a bite. It pays to advertise."
We passed a saucepan full of them up to Pee-wee and charged them up to
advertising. Westy said, "That's what you call overhead expense."
Believe me, that kid was some overhead expense, all right.
"You have to demonstrate," he shouted down.
"You're a pretty good demonstrator," a man called up to him.
I was laughing so hard I could hardly fry the cakes fast enough. There
was a big crowd outside, just scrambling for them, and we had Westy's
aluminum coffee-pot about half full of pennies. Up on the car, Pee-wee
was strutting up and down, waving the saucepan with one arm and holding
a cake in his other hand and shouting, "_O--oh, to taste one! Just to
TASTE one! Watch me eat one! Mm-mmm! They're one cent each! None genuine
unless stamped BE PREPARED!_ Send up some more, you fellows!"
After a little while we stopped to rest, and we asked Mr. Pedro to come
in and have lunch with us. In the afternoon we went around the grounds
and had some rides on the merry-go-round and tried our luck throwing
baseballs at a negro man. I won a Japanese doll. We found out that the
price of sandwiches had gone down to ten cents. Waffles were selling two
for a cent and going begging--that's what a man told us. He said
crullers were off the market. The coffee-man wanted to buy tenderflops
wholesale from us, but we wouldn't sell him any. Believe me, we had all
the visitors at that place eating out of our hands--that's no joke
either; it's true.
About four o'clock I mixed up all the stuff we had left. Already we had
eight dollars and we had only spent about four. So we had over four
dollars' profit. It would have been bigger, except for the overhead
expense. It costs a lot to advertise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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