“What’s that got to do with me?” Hervey asked. “Oh, positively, absolutely nothing,” I said. “Far be it from me to say you have any——” “Exterior motives,” shouted Pee-wee. “Ulterior motives,” I said. “Only I’m just telling you that maybe it will be a large collection of hours before the window of the cooking shack is closed up for the night. So don’t worry about falling into the water—yet. We’ll tell you in time.” “What do you mean, you’ll tell me in time?” said Hervey, very innocent like. Jiminy, he looked awful funny sitting up there on that window board with his knees drawn up, staring at us just as if he was puzzled to know what we were driving at. Insulted, kind of. That was him all over. Sort of careless like. You’d never think he had any plans at all. He never broke any rules on purpose—oh, far be it from it! “Got any new songs this summer?” Warde Hollister shouted at him. Because he always had a lot of crazy stuff that he was always singing and that’s why everybody called him the wandering minstrel. None of us ever knew where he got all the stuff he sang. He’d come wandering into camp late for supper twirling that funny cap of his on the end of a stick and singing, and the trustees or Uncle Jeb or maybe his scoutmaster who would be all ready with a good calling-down would just kind of smile and say nothing. The stormy petrel, they called him that too. Gee whiz, nobody could help liking that fellow. He was an odd number, I’ll say that. “All right, Hervey,” Westy called kind of good-natured like. Westy never breaks any camp rules, but just the same he likes Hervey. “Go on, give us a song.” So then Hervey started singing that crazy song that got us into so much trouble that summer. We couldn’t hear the end of it, because pretty soon we were at the landing and everybody was crowding there to meet us. Anyhow this is the way it started: “When you go on a hike just you mind what I say, The right way to go is the opposite way. If you come to a cross-road don’t make a mistake, Choose a road and the _other’s_ the one you should take. Don’t bother with sign boards but follow this song, If you start on the right road you’re sure to go wrong. You can go on your feet, you can go on a bike, But the right way is wrong when you start on a hike.” CHAPTER III HERVEY AND THE CAMP I don’t know, it seemed kind of natural, sort of, for us to see Hervey Willetts like that, away from all the other scouts at camp. I said to Westy I was kind of glad we saw him first just the way we did and that he wasn’t in the crowd at the landing. Westy said the same thing. I don’t know why he said that, but it seemed as if Hervey was different from everybody else; I guess that’s what we were thinking. Most always he was alone.