“That shows you that they’re all crazy!” Pee-wee screamed. “Not only they walk left-handed but they talk left-handed. They’d be tramping around the lake yet if it wasn’t for a couple of girls. And Roy Blakeley he writes all this crazy stuff up and has his picture on the cover of a lot of books and you girls will be in the stories, too—you see. But over in camp everybody says his whole patrol ought to be named the laughing hyenas; they’re so crazy that they jolly themselves when they haven’t got anybody else to jolly and they think it’s fun to tell a new tenderfoot to go out in the woods and see if he can hear the birch bark and invite a new troop up to their cabin and tell them there’s going to be a racket up there and then show them a tennis racket and they told a little fellow that wanted to play tennis where he could find a racket and they told him to come where I was if he wanted a racket, because I made rackets, and even Mr. Allison says that sometimes; they go too far——” “That’s why we just kept going round and round the lake this time,” I said. “Sometimes we go entirely too near; you as much as admitted it yourself.” CHAPTER XVII ANCIENT HISTORY Marjorie Eaton said, “Can you be serious for five minutes?” “How long?” Warde asked her. She said, “Long enough to tell us something about the scouts.” “You want a serial story about them?” Brent asked her. “We want a serious story about them,” she said. “That’s different,” I said. “Do you like pirate stories about them? Because there is buried treasure hidden in Black Lake. That’s no joke, it’s true—absolutely, posilutely. There’s a tin box at the bottom of Black Lake containing about three hundred dollars. The people that started Temple Camp sank a lot of money in the enterprise. We have buried treasure and everything else at Temple Camp.” “You’re fooling,” Stella Wingate said. I said, “A scout’s honor is to be toasted; it’s positively true. There’s a diagram in Administration Shack telling where it is—or isn’t, I don’t know which.” Just then Brent Gaylong kind of touched me on the shoulder and I could see that he winked at Pee-wee and Warde. He kind of put his arm over my shoulder and led me away and said, “For goodness’ sake, don’t start that buried treasure stuff, Roy. You’ll have Hervey diving in the middle of the lake for it. You know how he is.” “He must know about it,” I said. “I don’t think he does,” Brent said. “Anyway, you know Tom Slade and Uncle Jeb and the trustees want the fellows to forget about it. Whatever you do don’t get Hervey started on that, whether he knows about it or not. You know he can’t obey instructions, he just can’t, he’s built that way.