So then Willie Cook cooked his meat and potatoes and as long as he was a tenderfoot and didn’t know much about scouting we showed him how scouts eat. We let him keep one potato and about an ounce of meat to take back to camp for evidence to show to the raving Ravens. After that we felt pretty good so we sprawled around and rested a while. Scout Cook said, “Are you going straight back to camp?”
“Not straight,” Hervey said, “but we’re on our way there. If it’s where it was this morning, we’re going to go to it. I suppose it was there when you left, wasn’t it?”
“It’s usually there,” Bert said.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Pee-wee said to his new member; “they’ve been acting like that all day. They’ve been going around and around and around like a chicken with its head off. Hervey Willetts and Roy Blakeley are the worst of the lot.”
“Sure, we’re each worse than the other if not more so,” I said. “The question is, where do we go from here?”
“We go straight west to Temple Camp,” Pee-wee shouted; “we’re not going to, what d’you call it, deviate.”
“Call it whatever you want, I don’t care,” I said.
“And we’re going to go pretty soon, too,” the kid said; “we’re going to go while the column of smoke from the cooking shack is still going up. We can’t see the sun any more; we haven’t got anything to follow but the smoke.”
“Wrong the first time,” I said. “We’ve got Hervey Willetts to follow. I’d rather follow him than the sun; the sun always goes to the same place; he goes every which way. There’s no pep to the sun. Is there, Scout Cook?”
I guess the poor little kid thought we were a pack of lunatics. He didn’t know what to say.
“What time did you leave camp?” I asked him.
He said, “About one o’clock; just after the bus came with a lot of new scouts. There’s a big troop coming to-night and Uncle Jeb has go............