“That’s just like him,” Warde said. “He doesn’t even know the camp’s ’phone number.” We all sat on the fence across the road from the station and waited. CHAPTER XXIV THE FLAPPER AND THE FLOPPER In a minute or so Hervey came sailing out of the station with a funny kind of a hop, skip and jump that he has. He’s always doing that. He reached up and gave the telephone sign a good swing as he passed it. He had queer kind of bright eyes, Hervey had; all the scouts said so. I don’t know what it was about them. They were gray color and awful bright. I noticed them as he came over toward us that night. He was laughing and he said, “All right-o.” “What’d they say?” Brent asked him. “All right-o,” Hervey said again. “Who’d you talk with?” Brent asked him. “Who’d I talk with?” “Yere.” “Oh, I talked with a fellow, a scout,” Hervey said, sort of careless like. For a couple of seconds it seemed to me that Brent would go over to the station himself. But I guess he didn’t want to hurt Hervey’s feelings. He just said, “What was his name?” Hervey said in that happy-go-lucky way he has, “His name? Let’s see, his name was Wilkins. He said he’d tell the keepers.” Hervey always called the officials of Temple Camp keepers. The more he knew we didn’t like it the more he did it. Brent said kind of serious-like, “You talked to a scout by the name of Wilkins and told him we were going to the carnival and would get back about eleven?” “Precisely, exactly.” “And he said he’d tell the management?” “Precisely, exactly.” “Just what did he say?” “He said ‘All right.’ I bet I can kick that telephone sign down if I take a good running jump.” “All right, let’s beat it for the carnival,” Brent said. “Let’s leave the sign where it is.” “Just as you say, Doc,” Hervey said. All the way to the carnival, Brent was kind of quiet. But Hervey, he should worry. He was doing a new kind of scout pace, it was awful funny. The thing that stopped Brent from being kind of sober and worried happened at the carnival. After that everything seemed all right again. It was all on account of Pee-wee. The carnival was on the left-hand side of the road but I guess we would have gone to it anyway because we were hungry. Any port in a storm, that’s what Brent said. We had some frankfurters and, yum, they went good. Brent treated to them. There were lots of city people at that carnival, because Greenvale is a kind of a young city. It has a high school up on the hill. I suppose that’s why they call it high. It has movie shows and everything. In the field where the carnival was, was an old sign that said Earth For Sale. That shows how important Greenvale is. They thought they owned the earth. The field was all dolled up and there were a lot of booths and a merry-go-round and ten cent shows and everything. There were lots of people there wandering around.