All the while we were eating supper, we could see smoke curling up out of the woods across the lake, and we guessed that was where the girls had their camp.
"I bet they"re getting supper now," Connie said.
Pee-wee said, "Maybe some of us ought to borrow that store man"s boat and row over after them, because girls can"t row or paddle very well. It would be a good turn."
"_Good night_," I said; "didn"t you just eat three peach cakes and call that a good turn? You should worry about the girls. Probably they know how to row and paddle better than you do."
"You make me tired," he yelled; "scouts are supposed to do things for them, and show them how to do things."
"Well, they"ll see you doing enough things on the screen," I told him; "girls aren"t as helpless as you think they are. Come on, help get ready."
At about half-past seven, people began coming and I could see that we were going to have a big house, I mean a big car. First an automobile full of people arrived and then a lot more who had walked from Skiddyunk. Then a couple more automobiles came and pretty soon there were a half a dozen of them parked around the car, and the seats inside the car were full. Westy stood on the platform collecting ten cents from each one and letting them through, past the screen. Oh, boy, there was some crowd.
Pretty soon the store man came over and said that as long as the weather was so warm, it would be a good idea to open the car windows and have standing room outside. So he gave us some boxes and barrels and things to put outside the windows for people to stand on. All the people out there paid their ten cents just the same and they laughed and said it was a lot of fun. Some of them were summer people, I guess; holdovers.
The girls from _Camp Smile Awhile_ came over in two canoes and a rowboat.
When there wasn"t s.p.a.ce for another head to stick through a window, I got up in front of the screen and made a speech. This is what I said:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for coming to see our show, and we hope you"ll like it. I guess maybe I ought to tell you about Temple Camp, then you"ll understand the pictures better.
"Temple Camp is where lots of scouts go in the summer. It"s near the Hudson. Maybe you"ve heard about all the different things that scouts learn how to do. So these pictures will show you some of those things.
"Some of the things are hard, but some of them are easy, like eating and things like that. Especially desserts. So now the show will begin."
First we flashed the sentence that is in the handbook:
A SCOUT IS HANDY AND USEFUL
and then came the picture of Pee-wee with a big white ap.r.o.n on, standing in front of the stove in the cooking shack, stirring a big boiler full of soup. I heard one of the girls say, "Oh, _isn"t_ he simply too cute for _anything_!" Then we flashed another sentence that said:
A SCOUT IS SKILFUL
and then came the picture of Pee-wee standing at the kitchen table, rolling dough. Everybody applauded and the girls said it was wonderful, but that anyway, the Boy Scouts was started before the Camp-Fire Girls was, and so they had had more time to learn things. I heard one lady say it was _splendid_ how scouts got to be self-reliant, on account of learning the domestic arts.
Oh, bibbie, I just had to laugh, because that was the one thing that Pee-wee didn"t know anything about at all--cooking. The only thing that kid knew about domestic arts, was eating. He was a good ice-box inspector and pantry-shelf sleuth. He could track a jar of jam to its dim retreat, but when it came to cooking--_good night_! The only reason we had him in those pictures was because he was so small and looked so funny.
The next sentence we flashed said:
A SCOUT IS QUICK
and the picture showed Pee-wee flopping a wheat cake and catching it in the frying pan again. Honest, when we were trying to get that picture up at Temple Camp, the whole floor was covered with wheat cakes and there was one on Pee-wee"s head like a Happy Hooligan cap. But the audience didn"t know that. There are lots of things you don"t see in the movies.
It takes about twenty wheat cakes to get a good picture of Scout Harris flopping one.
The regular cook wasn"t there the day we got that picture.
CHAPTER XIII
AN INVITATION
That was the comedy sketch and Pee-wee was so puffed up over his screen success that he could hardly work the machine. I guess he felt as if he were a regular Douglas Fairbanks.
"Did you hear what those girls were saying?" he whispered to me behind the screen. "Did you hear what the one with the red sweater was saying?
About a scout being so resourceful? Did you hear her?"
"Oh, you"ve got the town eating out of your hand," I told him; "you"re a regular Mary Picklefoot. You"re such a swell cook you ought to cook for Cook"s Tours."
"Did you hear what one of them said about how I rolled the rolling pin?"
he whispered.
"She said you were the finest roller she ever saw," I said, in an undertone; "shh, you"ve got them going. There"s no use trying to stand up against the Boy Scouts of America."
"Didn"t I tell them scouts have to be resourceful?" he whispered "Did they notice how I flopped it?"
"They said you were the floppiest flopper they ever saw," I told him.
"Go ahead and give them some deep stuff."
So then we reeled off some pictures of good stunts at Temple Camp. One showed scouts doing fancy diving from the springboard, and there were a couple showing the races on the lake. The people seemed to like them a lot. Some of the pictures had Pee-wee in them and then there was a lot of applause. There was one showing the forest fire near camp; it was the best of all and everybody said so.
After the show, when the people were going, they all said it was fine and asked us a lot of questions about Temple Camp and scouting. Pee-wee got down off the car and stood around with his sleeves still rolled up and his jacket off, and everybody talked to him. Believe me, he was a walking advertis.e.m.e.nt for the scouts. I heard him telling one man that scouts had to have plenty of initials.
The man said, "What?"
"Initials," Pee-wee told him; "it means starting to do things of your own accord, see?"
The man laughed and he said, "Oh, you mean _initiative_." He said Pee-wee was worth ten cents not counting the movie show.
After most everyone else had gone, the girls all crowded around Pee-wee before they went back to their canoes. Oh, you should have seen that kid! The girl in the red sweater said, "My name is Grace Bentley and my friends want me to tell you what a perfectly _lovely_ time we"ve had.
And we think it"s just _wonderful_ how boy scouts are so, you know, what you may call it----"
"Sure," Pee-wee said; "resourceful, that"s what you mean."
She said, "But you must remember that the Camp-fire Girls are new and we"ll catch up to you yet."
"Oh, sure," Pee-wee said; "you"ll catch up with us. All you have to do is try. First I couldn"t learn scout pace. Gee, don"t get discouraged.
If you want to do a thing just make up your mind that you"ll do it. And if you can"t do it, do it anyway."
Gee, the rest of us just stood there trying to keep from screaming, while Pee-wee stood in the center of that crowd of girls, looking about as big as a toadstool, and giving them a scout lecture.
"All you have to do is try," he said; "did you notice where I was diving from the springboard?"
"Oh, I thought it was just _dandy_," a girl said.