All the while we were hiking along the road and all the fellows were laughing like they always do when Pee-wee and I are engaged in mortal come-back. He knows how to make nature yield—you know, all that kind of stuff. He can’t starve when he’s crossing a vacant lot, he can make table d’hote dinners out of roots like hunters lost in darkest Africa. If it gets chilly he can make Chile sauce out of the weather. _Some scout._ He’s so hungry he swallows everything he reads. He can find his way in the back yard by noticing the angle of an angleworm. I said, “If they don’t have any pop-corn at the carnival, we should worry. We can just take some holes and tie them together and make a fish net and catch some fish in the forest.” “You think you’re very smart,” he shouted. “You think the Catskills are a trackless wilderness. Those things are for when you’re in trackless wildernesses. I suppose you don’t know what unfathomable depths are,” he hollered at me. “I wouldn’t know one if I met it in the street,” I said. “But I never said that a large school of fish is a college.” “_Did I say that?_” he fairly yelled. “Sure, you told Mary Temple,” I said. “You told her a blazed trail is one that’s on fire.” “_You’re crazy!_” he screamed. “Don’t you suppose I know that?” I said. “_You know you’re crazy!_” he screeched triumphantly. “Absolutely,” I said. “That shows you’re wrong as usual when you say I don’t know anything.” “Knowing you’re crazy isn’t knowing anything,” he screamed. “Do you call that logic?” “Let up,” Brent started laughing. “Here’s a sign—School Go Slow.” “A school?” I said. “Believe me, I’ll not only go slow, I’ll stop altogether. I’ll even go the other way.” “Keep to the left,” Hervey said. I guess by this time you’re beginning to see how crazy we are. No wonder the squirrels eat out of our hands. They think we’re nuts. I guess we ought to be called the Cuckoo Patrol. CHAPTER XXIII HUNTING FOR TROUBLE But anyway this story isn’t all nonsense, and you’ll see it isn’t. And you’ll see that a tangled trail can be something else than just a crazy left-handed hike, too. On the road to Greenvale we passed a summer boarding-house named Shady Villa. There was a big sign across the private roadway to it. Hervey reached up with a muddy stick (that fellow always carries a stick) and marked an N after Villa. “Shady Villan,” he said. “Rub that out,” Brent said. “If you don’t know how to spell villain I wouldn’t advertise it to the whole world. That’s the trouble with you, you’re always having bad spells.” We sat on the railing there and watched some people playing tennis. Gee whiz, it made me wish for a game. It was just kind of before twilight, and the sun was a great big red ball.