Books: Pee Wee Harris
P >>
Percy Keese Fitzhugh >> Pee Wee Harris
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8
"Did she know I was coming?"
"No she didn't and--"
"Then she doesn't know everything," Pee-Wee said.
"Smarty, smarty!" the girl retorted, "I came out of an orphan home
and that's more than you can say.".
"You only get one helping of dessert there," said Pee-Wee. "I'd
rather be a scout than an orphan. I know a feller who was an orphan
and he was sorry for it afterwards."
"Are you going to stay all summer?"
"Till school opens," Pee-Wee said.
"Do you want me to show you where there's a woodchuck hole?"
At this point Pee-Wee was summoned again to the kitchen where he
ate a sumptuous repast, after which Pepsy and Wiggle took him about
and showed him the farm.
Pee-Wee and Pepsy fenced a good deal but seemed to progress in this
cautious and defensive way toward a friendly understanding. As for
Wiggle, he danced about, following elusive scents that led nowhere,
carried off and back again by quick impulse, till at last the three
ended their tour of inspection at a little summer house which had been
built over a spring by the roadside.
Here they drank of the bubbling, crystal water. Wiggle doing this
as everything else, with erratic impulse, drinking a dozen times and
not much at any time.
The dying sunlight painted the slopes of the valley with crimson
tints and the countryside was very still. Through the woods to the
west could be heard occasionally the discordant noise from the loose
flooring of the bridge on the highway as an auto sped over it. In the
quiet evening the sound, with its sudden start, its rattling clamor and
its quick cessation, made a jarring note in all the surrounding
peacefulness.
"That's what wakes me up in the morning, the mail wagon going
over," Pepsy said; "I know it's time to get up then. Those planks can
talk, they say the same thing every day."
You have to go back,
You have to go back,
You have to go back.
You listen to-morrow morning."
"They could never wake me up," Pee-Wee said, which was probably
true. "What do you mean about their saying you have to go back?"
"When Aunt Jamsiah took me, I was a probator. Do you know what
that means?"
"It's what they do with people's wills," Pee-Wee said.
"It means if I don't behave I have to go back to the orphan home,"
the girl said. "And every day I was afraid I'd have to go back--for a
long, long time, I was. And when I was lying in bed mornings I'd hear
the planks saying that--
You have to go back,
You have to go back.
just like that, and I'd get good and scared."
"You won't have to go back," said Pee-Wee.
"You leave it to me, I'll fix it. Those planks--I've known lots of
planks--and they can't tell the truth. Don't you care. I wouldn't believe
what an old plank said. Trees are all right, but planks--"
"I don't notice it so much now," Pepsy said; "that was a year ago
and Aunt Jamsiah says I'm all right and mind good except I'm a tomboy.
That ain't so bad, is it? Being a tomboy? A girl and me tried to set
the orphan home on fire because they licked us, but I'm good here. But
I wish they'd put a new floor on that bridge. Anyway, Aunt Jamsiah says
I'm good now."
Pee-Wee was about to speak, but noticing that the girl's eyes were
fixed upon a crimson patch on the hillside where the sun was going down,
and seeing that her eyes sparkled strangely (for indeed they were not
pretty eyes) he said nothing, like the bully little scout that he was.
"Anyway, one thing, I wouldn't let an old bridge get my goat, I
wouldn't," he said finally, "and besides, you said you would show me
a woodchuck hole."
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SCOUT
Pepsy's right name was Penelope Pepperall and Aunt Jamsiah had
taken her out of the County Home after the fire episode, by way of
saving her from the worse influence of a reformatory. She and Uncle
Ebenezer had agreed to be responsible for the girl, and Pepsy had
spent a year of joyous freedom at the farm marred only by the threat
hanging over her that she would be restored to the authorities upon
the least suspicion of misconduct.
She had done her work faithfully and become a help and a comfort
to her benefactors. She had a snappy temper and a sharp tongue and was,
indeed, something of a tomboy. But Aunt Jamsiah, though often annoyed
and sometimes chagrined, took a charitable view of these shortcomings
and her generous heart was not likely to confound them with genuine
misdoing.
So the stern condition of Pepsy's freedom had become something of
a dead letter, except in her own fearful fancy, and particularly when
that discordant voice of the bridge spoke ominously of her peril.
Pepsy had been trusted and had proven worthy of the trust. She had
never known any mother or father, nor any home save the institution
from which Aunt Jamsiah had rescued her, and she had grown to love her
kindly guardians and the old farm where she had much work but also much
freedom. "Chores will keep her out of mischief," Aunt Jamsiah had said.
Wiggle's ancestry and social standing were quite as much a mystery
as Pepsy's; he was not an aristocrat, that is certain, and having no
particular chores to do was free to devote his undivided time to
mischief; he concentrated on it, as the saying is, and thereby
accomplished wonders. He was Pepsy's steady comrade and the partner
of all her adventurous escapades.
Pepsy was not romantic and imaginative, her freckled face and tightly
braided red hair and thin legs with wrinkled cotton stockings, protested
against that. She had a simple mind with a touch of superstition. It was
a kind of morbid dread of the institution she had left which had conjured
that ramshackle old bridge up on the highway into an ominous voice of
warning, She hated the bridge and dreaded it as a thing haunted.
Pee-Wee soon became close friends with these two, and from a rather
cautious and defensive beginning Pepsy soon fell victim to the spell of
the little scout, as indeed everyone else did. Pepsy did not surrender
without a struggle. She showed Pee-Wee the woodchuck hole and Pee-Wee,
after a minute's skillful search, showed her the other hole, or back
entrance, under a stone wall.
"There are always two," he told her, "and one of them is usually
under a stone wall. They're smart, woodchucks are."
"Are they as smart as you?" she wanted to know.
"Smarter," Pee-Wee admitted, generously; "they're smarter than
skunks and even skunks are smarter than I am."
"I like you better than skunks," she said. Wiggle seemed to be of
the same opinion. "I like all the scouts on account of you," she said.
No one could be long in Pee-Wee's company without hearing about
the scouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping)
advertisement of the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking
and stalking and signaling and the miracles of cookery which his
friend Roy Blakeley had performed.
"Can he cook better than you?" Pepsy wanted to know, a bit dubiously.
"Yes, but I can eat more than he can," Pee-Wee said. And that seemed
to relieve her.
"I can make a locust come to me," he added, and suiting the action
to the word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded
locust to his very hand. At such wonder-working she could only gape
and stare. Wiggle appeared to claim the locust as a souvenir of the
scout's magic.
"You let it go, Wiggle," Pee-Wee said. "If you want to be a scout
you can't kill anything that doesn't do any harm. But you can kill
snakes and mosquitoes if you want to." Evidently it was the dream of
Wiggle's life to be a scout for he released the locust to Pee-Wee,
wagging his tail frantically.
"You have to be loyal, too," the young propagandist said; "that's
a rule. You have to be helpful and think up ways to help people. No
matter what happens you have to be loyal."
"Do you have to be loyal to orphan homes?" Pepsy wanted to know.
"If they lick you do you have to be loyal to them?"
Here was a poser for the scout. But being small Pee-Wee was able
to wriggle out of almost anything. "You have to be loyal where
loyalty is due," he said. "That's what the rule says; it's Rule Two.
But, anyway, there's another rule and that's Rule Seven and it says
you have to be kind. You can't be kind licking people, that's one sure
thing. So it's a technicality that you don't have to be loyal to an
orphan home. You can ask any lawyer because that's what you call logic."
"Deadwood Gamely's father is a lawyer," Pepsy said, "and I hate
Deadwood Gamely and I wouldn't go to his house to ask his father.
He's a smarty and I hit him with a tomato. Have I got a right to
do that--if he's a smarty?"
Here was another legal technicality, but Pee-Wee was equal to the
occasion. "A--a scout has to be a--he has to have a good aim," he said.
CHAPTER VII
A BIG IDEA
They had been driving the cows home during this learned
exposition on scouting. Two things were now perfectly clear
to Pepsy's simple mind. One, that she would be loyal at any
cost, loyal to her new friend, and through him to all the
scouts. She knew them only through him. They were a race of
wonder-workers away off in the surging metropolis of Bridgeboro.
She could not aspire to be one of them, but she could be loyal,
she could "stick up" for them.
The other matter which was now settled, once and for all, was that
it was all right to throw a tomato at a person you hated provided only
that you hit the mark. Aunt Jamsiah had been all wrong in her anger at
that exploit which had stirred the village. For to throw a tomato at
the son of Lawyer Gamely was aiming very high.
The son of Lawyer Gamely had a Ford and worked in the bank at
Baxter City and was a mighty sport who wore white collars and red
ties and said that "Everdoze was asleep and didn't have brains
enough to lie down," and all such stuff.
Pee-Wee let down the bars while the patient cows waited, and Scout
Wiggle (knowing that a scout should be helpful) gave the last cow a
snip on the leg to help her along.
Here, at these rustic bars, ended Pepsy's chores for the day and in
the delightful interval before supper she and Pee-Wee lolled in the well
house by the roadside. Wiggle, with characteristic indecision, chased
the cows a few yards, returned to his companions, darted off to chase
the cows again, deserted that pastime with erratic suddenness, and
returned again wagging his tail and looking up intently as if to ask,
"What next?" Then he lay down panting. Mr. Ellsworth, Pee-Wee's
scoutmaster, would have said that Wiggle lacked method. ...
"If I had a lot of money," Pepsy said, "you could teach me all
the things that scouts know and I'd pay you ever so much. Once I
had forty cents but I spent it at the Mammoth Carnival. I paid ten
cents to throw six balls so I could get a funny doll and I never hit
the doll and when I only had ten cents left I made believe the doll
was Deadwood Gamely and I hated and hated with all my might while I
threw the ball the last six times but I couldn't hit the doll."
"You can't aim so good when you're mad," Pee-Wee said, "so if you
want to hit somebody with a tomato or an egg or anything like that you
just have kind thoughts about the person that you're aiming at, only
you're not supposed to throw tomatoes and eggs and things because you
can have more fun eating them. I wouldn't waste a tomato on that
feller because anyway you've got your tongue."
"You can't sass him," said Pepsy, "because he uses big words and
he's such a smarty and he makes you feel silly and then you begin to
cry and get mad. When he says I'm an orphan and things--and things--Wiggle
hates him, too, don't you, Wiggle?" The girl was almost crying then and
Pee-Wee comforted her.
"Do you think I don't know any long words?" he said. "I know some
of the longest words that were ever invented and--and--even I can make
special ones myself. Once I--don't you cry--once I was kept in school
and Julia Carson was kept in too, because she wriggled in her seat--you
know how girls do. I had to choose a word and write it a hundred times
and I didn't want to get through too soon, because I wanted to get out
the same time she did. So I chose the word incomprehensibility, and I--"
"Is that girl pretty?" Pepsy wanted to know.
"She's got a wart on her finger. It's the best one I ever saw,"
Pee-Wee said. "She's afraid to get in a boat, that girl is."
"I hate her," Pepsy said.
"What for?" Pee-Wee inquired. "Because she has a wart? Don't you
know it's good luck to have warts?"
"Because--because she was bad and had to stay after school," Pepsy
said.
"That shows how much you know about logic," Pee-Wee said, "because
I had to stay too and I was worse than she was. So there."
"I wouldn't be afraid to get in a boat," Pepsy said proudly.
"I never said she was like you," Pee-Wee declared. "She's not a
tomboy."
Pepsy seemed comforted.
"You leave that feller to me," Pee-Wee said. "I can handle Roy
Blakeley and all his patrol and they're a lot of jolliers--they think
they're so smart."
"I like you better than all of them," Pepsy said. "Sometimes I'm
kept after school too, you can ask Miss Bellison."
"One thing sure, I like you well enough to be partners with you,"
Pee-Wee said. "Do you want me to tell you something? I thought of a way
to make a lot of money, and if I do I'm going to buy three new tents
for our troop. Do you want to go partners with me? We'll say the tents
are from both of us and we'll have a lot of fun."
"I had a dollar once and I sent it to the heathens," Pepsy said,
"and I'd rather help you than the heathens, because I like you better."
"Heathens are all right," Pee-Wee said, "and I'm not saying anything
against heathens, especially wild ones, but we're just as wild. You
ought to go to Temple Camp and see how wild we are."
He did not look very wild as he sat upon the narrow seat with his
knees drawn up and his scout hat on the back of his head showing his
curly hair.
The girl gazed at his natty khaki attire, the row of merit badges
on his sleeve, the trophies of his heroic triumphs. She was not the
first to feel the lure of a uniform. But it was the first uniform she
had ever seen at close range, for in the wartime she had been in that
frowning brick structure which still haunted her.
"I'll help you because you can do everything and you know a lot,"
she said.
In the fullness of her generosity and loyalty to Pee-Wee's prowess
she never reminded him or even thought of the things she could do
which he could not. She would not do her little optional chore of
milking a cow for fear he might perceive her superiority in this
little item of proficiency. Poor girl, she was a better scout than she
knew.
"If you think it up I'll do all the work, and then we'll be even,"
she said.
So Pee-Wee told her of the colossal scheme which his lively
imagination had conceived.
"It all started with a hot frankfurter," he said. "If I hadn't
bought a hot frankfurter I wouldn't have thought of it. So that
shows you how important a frankfurter is--kind of. Maybe a person
might get to be a millionaire just starting with a frankfurter,
you never can tell. ..."
CHAPTER VIII
MAKING PLANS
"I bought that frankfurter at a shack up on the highway and while I
was eating it I just happened to think that as long as there's lots of
fruit and things here and as long as you know how to make fudge, we'd
start a shack right here in this well house and sell lemonade and fruit
and fudge and cookies and things, and if we make lots of money I'd go
up to Baxter City and buy some auto accessories like spark plugs and
tire tape and things and we'd sell those, too. We'd put signs on the
trees along the road telling people to stop here and I know how to
make up signs so as to get people good and hungry. You have them say
that things are hot in the pan and you have to have drinks with names
like arctic and all like that. I know how to make them hungry and
thirsty and I've got a balloon that I can blow up--see? And we'd print
something on it and tie it to Wiggle's tail and make him walk up and
down the road. What do you say? Isn't it a peachy scheme? Will you
help me?"
No dream of Pee-Wee's could be impossible of fulfillment. With him,
to try was to succeed, according to Pepsy's simple and unbounded faith.
The plan must be all right, and wondrous in its possibilities. It was
all inspiration--born of a frankfurter. It was not for poor Pepsy to
take issue with this master mind.
Yet she did venture to say, "Not very many autos come down here,
only a few that go through to Berryville. Licorice Stick--"
"That's a dandy name," Pee-Wee said.
"He goes by a dozen times a day, but he hasn't got any money, and
Mr. Flint goes by but he's a miser and Doctor Killem goes by in his
buggy and he says people eat too much--"
"He's crazy!" Pee-Wee shouted.
"And that's everybody that goes by except a few when they have the
town fair in Berryville."
For a moment Pee-Wee paused, balked but not beaten. "There's going
to be an Uncle Tom's Cabin show in Berryville," he said, "and the town
fair, that's two things. Let's start in and maybe later there'll be
some summer boarders in Berryville. We'll have waffles--I can make
those. And we'll have lemonade and fruit and all kinds of things and
when you're doing your chores I'll tend counter. We'll make a lot of
money, you see if we don't."
In her generous confidence, Pepsy was quite carried away by
Pee-Wee's enthusiasm. She knew (who better than she?) that strangers
never came along that lonely by-road. But she believed that somehow
they would come when the scout waved his magic wand.
"And I'll make cookies," she said, "and all the things to eat and
you can print the signs--"
"And shout to the people going by," Pee-Wee concluded
enthusiastically. "You have to yell ALL HOT! THEY'RE ALL HOT! Just
like that."
Few could resist this, Pepsy least of all. "Let's go and ask Aunt
Jamsiah about it right now," she said.
"Let me do it, I know how to handle her," said Pee-Wee.
And Pepsy deferred to the master mind, as usual.
CHAPTER IX
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE
Permission to use the well house once secured, preparations for
the vast enterprise progressed rapidly. The very next day, while
Pepsy was at her chores, Pee-Wee built a counter in the shack and
sitting at this he printed signs to be displayed along the woody
approaches to this mouth-watering dispensary.
Neither the gloomy predictions of his uncle nor the laughing
skepticism of his aunt dimmed his enterprising ardor. The signs
which he printed with his uncle's crate stencil, procured from
the barn, bespoke the variety of tempting offerings which existed
so far only in his fertile mind.
He was somewhat handicapped in the preparation of these signs
by the largeness of the perforated letters of the stencil and the
limited size of the cards. He had preferred cards to paper because
they would not blow and tear and Aunt Jamsiah had given him a pile
of these, uniform in size, on one side of which had been printed
election notices of the previous year. It was impossible,
therefore, for Pee-Wee to include all of each tempting announcement
on one card, so he used two cards for each reminder to the public.
Thus on one card he printed FRANKFURTERS and on its mate intended
for posting just below, the palate-tickling conclusion, SIZZLING HOT.
FRANKFURTERS
SIZZLING HOT -->
This is how the sign would appear upon some fence or tree. It
would be a knockout blow to any hungry wayfarer.
Another two--card sign, intended for warmer weather, read:
ICE CREAM
<-- COLD AND COOLING
Other signs originating in Pee-Wee's fertile mind and covering
the range of food and drink and auto accessories were these:
PEANUT TAFFY
SWEET AND DELICIOUS -->
OUR TIRE TAPE
<-- STICKS LIKE GLUE
NON SKID
CHAINS -->
FRESH
<-- BANANAS
DRINK
SWEET CIDER -->
MAGIC
<-- CARBON REMOVER
There were many others, enough to decorate the road for miles in
both directions. If Pepsy as chef could live up to Pee-Wee's promises
the neighborhood would soon become famous. That was her one forlorn
hope, that the fame of their offerings would get abroad and lure the
traffic from its wonted path. But Pee-Wee's enthusiasm and energy
carried all before them like a storming column and she was soon as
hopeful and confident as he.
When her chores were finished that afternoon she hurried to their
refreshment parlor, where Pee-Wee sat behind the new counter like a
stern schoolmaster, cards strewn about him, his round face black with
stencil ink, still turning out advertising bait for the public.
"I don't care what they say," she panted; "we're going to make a
lot of money and buy the tents. I tripped on the third step in the
house just now and that means surely we'll have good luck and I can
help just as much as if I was a really truly scout, can't I? Aunt
Jamsiah says if I make a lot of doughnuts you'll just eat them all
and there won't be any to sell. We mustn't eat the things ourselves,
must we?"
"That shows how much she knows," Pee-Wee said; "we might have to
do that to make the people hungry. If they see me eating a doughnut
and looking very happy, won't that make them want to buy some? We
have upkeep expenses, don't we?"
"Yes, and I'm sorry I didn't tell her that," Pepsy said, "but I
never thought of it. You always think of things. I'm going to wash
the ink off your face, so hold still."
She dipped her gingham apron under the trapdoor in the flooring
where the clear, cool water was, and taking his chin in her coarse
little freckly hands, washed the face of her hero and partner. And
meanwhile Wiggle tugged on her apron as if he thought she were
inflicting some injury upon the boy.
So blinded was Pee-Wee by this vigorous bath and so preoccupied
the others that for the moment none of them noticed the young fellow
of about twenty who, with hat tilted rakishly on the side of his head
and cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, stood in the
road watching them.
CHAPTER X
DEADWOOD GAMELY TALKS BUSINESS
Deadwood Gamely was the village sport and enjoyed a certain prestige
because his father was a lawyer. He was also somewhat of an object of
awe because he went to Baxter City every day, and worked in the bank
there.
His ramshackle Ford roadster was considered an evidence of the
terribly reckless extravagance of his habits, but it was really
nothing more than a sort of pocketbook, since all his money went
into it, and a very shabby one at that. He had a cheap wit and
swaggeringly condescending air which he practiced on the simple
inhabitants of Everdoze, and in his banter he was not always kind.
Yet notwithstanding that he was tawdry both in dress and speech the
villagers did not venture much into the conversational arena with
him because they knew that they were not his equals in banter and
retort.
"Hello, little orphan Annie," he said. "Bungel was telling me the
wagon is coming for you pretty soon. Over the hill to the poorhouse.
Ever hear that song? What's that you've got there, a soldier? Watcher
doing with him? Lucky kid, I'd like to be a soldier."
"What were you, a slacker?" Pee-Wee shouted.
This was not the kind of retort that Deadwood Gamely was accustomed
to hearing and he gave a quick look at the small stranger in khaki who
sat behind the counter like a judge on the bench staring straight at him.
"Don't get him riled," Pepsy whispered. "He likes to get me riled
so's just to make me feel silly; it's--it's Deadwood Gamely. He's always
togged out swell like that," she added fearfully.
"The only thing that's swell about him is his head," said Pee-Wee in
his loudest voice. "Don't you be scared of him, I'm here."
"What's that?" said the young man in a tone intended to be darkly
menacing.
"You'd better put your hat on the top of your head or it'll blow
off," said Pee-Wee. "I said that I'm here. Let's hear you deny it. If
I was a crow I might be afraid of you."
Slightly taken aback by his ready retorts, the young man could only
say, "If you were a crow, hey?" He stepped a little closer to the
counter but the ominous advance did not alarm Pee-Wee in the least. He
sat behind his card-strewn counter holding the stencil brush like a sort
of weapon ready to besmear that face of sneering assurance if its owner
ventured too near.
"So I'm a scarecrow, eh?" Mr. Gamely said with a side glance at
Pepsy. He was not going to have her witness his discomfiture at the
hands of this glib little stranger. Moreover, a slur at his personal
splendor was a very grave matter and not to be overlooked.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8