CHAPTER XIII

IT IS TO LAUGH

Dub and Sandy and Pee-wee and I all just stared at each other.

“Did--didn’t his--Mr. Bagley--didn’t his father leave him a lot of money and everything in a will?” the kid blurted out.

The girl said, “Oh goodness me, no. He’s been telling everybody that for years. Oh he’s perfectly harmless, only he wanders off.”

I said, “Will you please excuse me while I drop dead? We met him over at Bagley’s Green and he told us his father got killed in Beaver Chasm and that his last will got lost there.”

“That’s just like him,” the girl said. “His father did lose his life there but there wasn’t any _will_. Oh goodness me, did he tell you that?”

“Haven’t we been hunting for the will?” Sandy blurted right out.

The girl just looked at us and then, _goodnight_, she started laughing. Boy, I never saw anybody laugh so hard. She said, “Oh it’s just too _excruciating_!”

“You think you’re big using hard words,” the kid said. “What do we care about wills? Do you say robbers aren’t more important than wills? If you saw what I saw last night you wouldn’t be standing there laughing like a--like a hyena. _A regular robber’s den._”

The girl said, “Well, if that’s what you saw you’d better run and tell the police. But I bet all you saw was the camp of the moving picture people who have a regular robber’s cave over in the chasm and they’re making part of a picture there. We’ve been over there three or four times to watch them. And, oh I think you’re just too funny for _anything_!”

Oh boy, I wish you could have seen Pee-wee! He just stared at her.

She said, “Don’t tell me it was a little rush-covered lean-to that you saw! Why that’s the place where the kidnapped child is taken to--and kept there by the robbers. Mr. Hartley, he’s one of the robbers, and he’s a perfectly lovely man. He comes up here to town lots and lots.”

“I guess he was here last night,” I said.

Even still, Pee-wee just stared.

I said, “Well there’s only one thing for us to do now and that is to rescue that child from the moving picture robbers. Anyway I feel the need of an ice cream cone to keep me from laughing to death.”

Even after we started away the girl was sitting there on the porch steps laughing at us. I was glad when we got around the corner. Pee-wee didn’t say a single word.

“Two strikes out,” I said. “There goes the will, also the robbers. I blame it all to Pee-wee’s windmeter. Those were the two most thrilling adventures I ever didn’t have. But anyway I’ve got a new idea----”

“If it’s crazy we’re not going to do it,” the kid shouted.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “Don’t ever mention the word crazy to me again. And the next time you wake me up at five o’clock in the morning I’ll kill you. What are we going to do now?”

“One thing, we’re not going to make any solemn pledge,” the kid said.

Sandy said, “The more we don’t make, the better I’ll like it. Anyway we can camp in the chasm to-night, can’t we? I say let’s go back and get acquainted with those movie people.”

Dub said, “Sure, maybe we can get them to take pictures of us hunting for old man Bagley’s will.”

“Well, anyway,” I said, “there’s one thing that’s real and that’s ice cream cones. What do you say we go and get some and then start back?”

Dub said, “Let’s not bother.”

“Do you call ice cream cones a bother?” the kid shouted.

“Maybe they’re a bother, but I don’t mind a little bother,” Sandy said. “If I was coaxed I might even eat two.”

“I don’t believe we’ll find any stores open yet,” Dub said.

“I can eat seven even without being coaxed,” Pee-wee said.

“You have to coax him to stop,” I told Sandy.

I had to laugh, we started out to hunt for a lost will, then we got started after a reward for finding some bandits, and there we were in Bagley Center on the trail of ice cream cones.

I said to them, “This is just the kind of a hike I like, it’s full of adventures that we don’t have--it’s safe and insane.”

The kid said, “That’s a good name for it. Why don’t you call it _Roy Blakeley’s Safe and Insane Hike_?”

“Wait till it’s finished,” I said. “Now if we could only save somebody’s life and then find that it wasn’t anybody after all.”

“Every hike you have you get crazier,” Pee-wee said.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of snappiness,” I told him. “The most interesting things you do are the things you don’t do, I’ll leave it to Sandy. You take adventures; you don’t know what to do with them after you get them. If you could keep them it would be all right. I should worry about having adventures. _I’m_ out for fun, that’s what I’m out for. Now you take young Scout Harris. It’s different with him.”

“I’ve got some sense,” Pee-wee said. “Do you mean to tell me that place didn’t look like a robber’s den?”

“I don’t know, I never saw a robber’s den,” I told him.

“But if there was a robber’s den it would look like that, wouldn’t it?” he shouted at me. “Didn’t we get all excited? Wasn’t that an adventure? It’s better than a lot of nonsense like you usually have in your crazy hike stories.”

All the time we were going down the main street of Bagley Center and Dub and Sandy were laughing at us. Pretty soon we came to a candy store and we went in and got some cones. Sandy said he would pay for them out of the reward we didn’t get. We all sat along the counter eating them. The man--gee, he was a nice man--he stood there talking to us. Dub asked him if he knew the moving picture people over at the chasm.

He said, “You mean the folks that was doing that Cumberland Mountain stuff? Yes, they often come over here. Guess they’re pretty near finished, ain’t they? I heard they was finishing up. That’s a pretty clever youngster they got with them, so I hear. You boys seen him? Dresses up like one of you Scout fellers. What’s his name--Bunko Bravado, is it? He’s only ’bout sixteen or so. He was in here after some candy one day. Yes, they’re a great lot. I see a picture down to Peekskill last winter had that kid in it. Why they threw him off a big cliff and the next you see he was swimming in the water. Gave me the shivers. He’s escaping from a band of kidnappers, or something or other like that, over in the chasm, so I hear.”

Dub said, “I bet it’s hard candy he eats.”

“Sure, rock candy,” Sandy said.

The man said, “I think it was marshmallows.”

Pee-wee didn’t bother saying anything till he finished his cone--he was too busy. Then, all of a sudden he opened up.

“That shows how much you don’t know,” he said to the man, “because boys in moving pictures are a lot of bluffs. That was just a dummy they threw off the cliff. They don’t do real things like Scouts do. Some of them do like Douglas Fairbanks, but most of them, I can do better things myself--thrilling and all that.”

“Douglas Fairbanks is terribly jealous of him,” I said to the man. “If you should see Douglas Fairbanks, don’t mention the name of Scout Harris, whatever you do--it only makes trouble.”

“They’re a lot of false alarms in the movies,” the kid said. “When it comes to running and trailing and stalking and jumping and showing resources and things Boy Scouts can beat them every time. Scouts, they know how to swim and dive--they don’t have to have rag dummies to do their stunts for them--_geeeee whiz_!”

“They can even do their own eating,” I said.

So then each of us had another cone and after that we started back to Beaver Chasm.