anted 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.

CHAPT