t within sight of the lake so that the West Ketchem student body
could see it while at their lessons. A kind of slow torture.

Pee-wee had never before seen the familiar realities of school life thus
brought low and lying in inglorious disorder at his feet. It gave him a
feeling of triumph and had a fascination for him. Damp smelling books
were here and there among the ruins, histories, arithmetics, algebras
and grammars. He could tread upon these with his valiant heel. A huge
roll call book (ah, how well he knew it even in the darkness) lay
charred and soggy near the assembly-room piano. Junk heaps had always
had a fascination for Pee-wee and had yielded up some of his rarest
treasures. But a school, with all its disciplinary claptrap reduced to a
junk heap! He could not, even in this late hour and strange country,
tear himself away from it.

But another influence caused him to hesitate. What should he do? There
were hardly any lights in the town now. He was a scout and he could not
reconcile himself to the commonplace device of going to someone's house
and asking for shelter. His scout training had taught him self-reliance
and resource, and here was the chance to apply them, to go home, to find
his way without anyone's help. The lonely road called to him more than
the dark houses did.

But how about the car? Mr. Bartlett's stolen car? Would it be the way of
a scout to go home and tell about that? He had come in the car,
Providence had made him its guardian, and he would take it back again
and say, (or words to this effect) "Here is your super six Hunkajunk
car, Mr. Bartlett; they tried to steal it but I _foiled_ them! I was
disguised as a buffalo robe."

There was only one difficulty in the way of this heroic course and that
was that he could not run the car. Never again would he touch one of
those frightful nickel things on the instrument board. So, wishing to
handle this harrowing situation alone, with true scout prowess and
resource, he kicked around among the ruins of that tyrannous and fallen
empire, and tried to devise some plan.

Suddenly he heard a sound near him. He paused in the darkness, his scout
heel upon a poor, defenseless crumpled spelling book. Thus he stood in
mingled triumph and agitation, his heart beating fast, every nerve on
edge.

"Who--who's there?" he said.

He moved again, and was startled as his foot slipped off the charred
timber on which he was walking. The brisk autumn wind was pl