I guess he was going to dip it in the water when all of a sudden, _good night_, there were a couple of girls coming out through the bushes. They were laughing kind of just as if they had been spying on us, but all of a sudden they set up a howl and the next thing I saw there was Pee-wee jumping around in the boat and the boat was rocking about half full of water. One of his legs was outside, and he didn’t seem to know whether to stay in the boat or get out of it. Gee whiz, it wouldn’t have made much difference because there was just about as much water inside as there was outside. “Oh, he pulled the plug out—_the rag_!” one of the girls said. “Isn’t that too _funny_!” “It shows you don’t know what funny means,” Pee-wee spluttered. By that time the boat was more than half full and he was flopping around in the water outside it. One good thing, the water was shallow but the bottom was all mud and he was floundering around in it and lifting one leg after the other high up trying to walk up on shore. The water was too shallow to swim in and too deep to walk in especially on account of the muddy bottom. Pretty soon he was on shore all covered with mud, and the rest of us were all standing around screaming. “He pulled the plug out, he _pulled the plug out_!” one of the girls kept screaming—you know how they do. She said, “I never saw _anything_ so excruciating in all my _born days_!” The other girl was laughing so hard she couldn’t say a word. Brent said, “Fair maids, does this boat belong to you?” One of the girls said, “Yes, does this little boy belong to you? Oh, he’s just too funny for anything! We had a rag stuffed into a hole in the bottom of the boat to keep the water from coming in. We’re camping just above here. Oh, he’s simply covered with mud. You’re simply _covered_ with mud,” she said to Pee-wee. “Do you think I don’t know that?” he spluttered. “I—I found it out as soon as you did.” Brent said very sober like to the girls, “You should have had two holes in the boat, one for the water to come in through and one for it to go out through; then a rag would not be necessary.” “It shows how much you know about scouting,” the kid shouted, all the while wiping the mud from his clothes and then transferring it to his face with his hand. “That’s just like girls, stopping a hole up with a rag. That might have happened in the middle of the lake only it didn’t, and I might have been drowned on account of that rag, only I wouldn’t because I know how to swim anyway.” “Oh, isn’t he just too cute!” one of the girls said. “And he knows how to swim,” the other said. I said, “Oh, he’s very smart; he knows more than his teacher, that’s why she asks him so many questions. Even the head of the Board of Education asked him, ‘How are things?’ He didn’t know, he had to ask Pee-wee. His name is Pee-wee for short.” “He’s certainly short enough,” one of the girls said.