CHAPTER X

THE DISTANT FLICKER

I made flipflops for lunch and Pee-wee ate eleven of them. Dub ate seven. Sandy said he could eat them as fast as I could make them, but I was four ahead of him when he stopped. So then we each took one. That made twelve for Pee-wee. He wanted one more but I said it would be bad luck.

We had bad luck anyway. We dug around all afternoon in all the crevices and places and we drained out that pool and poked all around between the rocks in the bottom of it. We couldn’t find any oilskin container. We turned over lots of rocks in the bed of the brook and looked underneath to see if anything might have got wedged there. Wherever two rocks were close together we pried them apart. We found lots of things that had got caught when they were floating down the stream, pieces of wood and things like that. And we felt all around at the roots of bushes that were under water when the brook was running. One place, in a crevice between two rocks, we found a whistle made out of willow wood. It was so dry the bark curled right off it. I said I guessed it came from Temple Camp. But Sandy said _no_, because the brook flowed into Black Lake. Maybe some kid away up in the mountains made that whistle and lost it in the brook, hey?

We kept on hunting till suppertime and then I fried bacon and we roasted potatoes and Pee-wee’s face got all blackened up eating them. So I opened a can of soup so he could get the black off his face and that only made his face worse--honest he looked like a coal-bin. There was a spring and we got water from that. There was a cross cut in the rock over it and Pee-wee said it was an Indian sign. Dub said, “Maybe the last of the Mohegans are camping around here.”

“Sure,” I said, “maybe there’s a tribe of Indian motorcycles parked up the line. Wherever Pee-wee goes he sees Indian signs. Once he saw some Indian meal in the street and he thought a tribe of Indians had passed through. He thinks a hotel reservation is where Indians live. I can tell you what that cross means,” I said, “and you want to remember it wherever you hike around these parts. It means the water in that spring has been tested and it’s all right. That cross was put there by a savage tribe of doctors. Pee-wee knows all about signs. He went to night school and he can even read them in the dark.”

I had to laugh at the kid, he was sitting there with his face all blackened up, munching an apple. I said, “Are you sure you had enough to eat? Pretty soon it will be dark and then you won’t be able to find your mouth any more.”

“You think you’re smart showing off in front of new fellers,” the kid said. He could hardly speak, he was having such a mortal combat with a big bite of apple.

“If you took smaller bites they wouldn’t be so big,” I told him. “You ought to take your bites in two sections, then you’d think you were eating two apples--don’t answer till convenient.”

“Ythnkersmartdontyer,” Pee-wee munched at me.

“Explain all that,” I said. “Do you know Pee-wee’s favorite word?” I asked Dub and Sandy. “_Troop_ because it rhymes with _soup_. Look out now, he’s going to speak.”

“Do you mean to say Indians were never around here?” the kid shouted. “Didn’t Uncle Jeb even find an old arrow in the woods?”

“It was an old Pierce-Arrow,” I said. “Pee-wee is so dumb he thinks an especially fine ford across a stream is called a Lincoln--take your time and answer, pronouncing each word distinctly.”

“Do you know what he said?” Pee-wee screamed at Dub and Sandy. “He has to be so smart with new fellers at camp he told Harold Titus that a tomahawk is a male bird and Harold Titus wrote it down in his scout record book. I’m warning you to be careful because you’re new fellers and the first thing you know he’ll make fools of you like when he told even a little lame tenderfoot that Robin Hood is a bird’s hat, you can ask Westy Martin in his own patrol and even worse he told another little feller----”

“We’ll wait while you take a bite,” I said.

“I can eat and talk too!” the kid shouted. “Even he told another tenderfoot that the rule that says you have to hike one mile and back means that you have to come back backwards and that tenderfoot tried to do it and he slipped and hurt his kneecap----”

“That’s no place to wear a cap,” Dub said.

“Absolutely right,” I spoke up gallantly.

“He hurt himself in three places,” the kid yelled.

“He should keep out of such places,” Sandy said.

“Absolutely positively correct the first time,” I said. “A true Scout wouldn’t go to such places--I leave it to Dub.”

“What places are you talking about?” Pee-wee yelled.

“Any places,” I said. “What’s the difference? As for that tenderfoot or tender knee or whatever he was, his name was Piker, he was so mean that when the flag was raised he only gave two cheers. Anyway what’s that got to do with Indians? Whenever Pee-wee can’t answer an argument he takes a big bite of his apple--it’s a cinch.”

By that time it was dark and we were just getting ready to start a little camp-fire when all of a sudden the kid said, “Look!”

“Is it Indians?” I asked him.

“Shh--look!” he said. “There’s a light way down in the other end of the chasm.”

We all looked, and jiminy crinkums if he wasn’t right. Away far down at the other end we could see a little light shining. I guess maybe that was a half a mile away.

“That’s blamed funny,” I said. “I wonder what that is.”

“It’s human beings,” Pee-wee said in a kind of a scared whisper.

“I never heard of anybody camping in here,” I said. Dub and Sandy just looked. We were all good and surprised. It was just a teeny little light, away off, but it had us guessing.

Sandy said, “I don’t just like to turn in for the night without knowing who that is.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“What’s the difference?” Dub said.

“The difference is I’m going to find out who it is,” Pee-wee said. “I’m going to sneak up and find out. Do you think I’m going to sleep in this chasm with bandits, maybe? Maybe it’s those same bandits that robbed the post office in Warnerville the other night.”

I said, “It’s too bad you threw away the core of your apple, you might need it to throw at them.”

But Dub and Sandy didn’t laugh, they just kept gazing down through the dark chasm at that little light. Seeing it there kind of made the chasm seem even more dark and spooky. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there was some one else in the chasm only, gee whiz, I wanted to know who it was. A light isn’t always so cheerful--sometimes it’s kind of scary.