He had no appetite for rice cakes now. He took some cakes of chocolate and a couple of hard biscuits and stuffed them in his pocket. Then he went out into the cockpit and listened. There was no sound of voices or footfalls, nothing but the myriad voices of nature, or frogs croaking nearby, of a cheery cricket somewhere on shore, of the water lapping against the broken old wharf as the wind drove it in shoreward. He returned to the cabin, tore a leaf from his scout notebook and wrote, but he had to blink his eyes to keep back the tears. "Dear Roy: "I think you'll have more fun if you two go the rest of the way alone. I always said two's a company, three's a crowd. You've heard me say it and I ought to have had sense enough to remember it. But anyway, I'm not mad and I like you just as much. I'll see you at camp. "WALTER HARRIS." "P. S.--If I had to vote again for patrol leader I'd vote for you." He was particular not to mention Tom by name and to address his note to Roy. He laid it in the frying pan on the stove (in which he had intended to make the rice cakes) and then, with his duffel bag over his shoulder and his scout staff in hand, he stepped from the _Good Turn_, listening cautiously for approaching footsteps, and finding the way clear he stole away through the darkness. CHAPTER X PEE-WEE'S ADVENTURE A walk of a few yards or so brought him to the railroad track. He was no longer the clown and mascot of the _Good Turn_; he was the scout, alert, resourceful, bent on hiding his tracks. He did not know where he was going, more than that he was going to elude pursuit and find a suitable spot in which to camp for the night. Matters would take care of themselves in the daytime. He wanted to follow the railroad tracks, for he knew that would keep him close to the river, but he knew also that it had the disadvantage of being the very thing the boys would suppose it most likely that he would do. For, feel as he would toward them, he did not for a moment believe that they would let him take himself off without searching for him. And he knew something of Tom Slade's ability as a tracker. "They won't get any merit badges trailing _me_, though," he said. So he crossed the tracks and walked a couple of hundred feet or so up a hill, grabbed the limb of a tree, swung up into its branches, let himself down on the other side, and retraced his steps to the tracks and began to walk the ties, northward. He was now thoroughly in the spirit of the escapade and a feeling of independence seized him, a feeling that every scout knows, that having undertaken a thing he must succeed in it.