The man said, “I should have kept out of that rut; now I’m in a nice pickle.” “Don’t you care,” I said, “we’ve been getting into the wrong places all day and we’re happy.”
“Pickles aren’t so bad,” Pee-wee shouted; “I wouldn’t mind being in a whole barrel of pickles. We’ll help you out, only if you’re not charging too much for that garage we’d like to buy it if you’ll cart it to Temple Camp. We’ll give you more than the chickens will give you. There’s a troop up at camp that haven’t got any accommodations and they’ll be coming along in the jitney bus pretty soon. Hey, mister, will you sell us the garage? We’ll give you fourteen cents deposit on it right now.”
“Sure,” I said, “you can take a mortgage for the rest; good idea. Pee-wee, you’re a brick.”
“It’s an inspiration,” Pee-wee said; “we’ll wind our funny-bone hike up with a crazy good turn, hey? We’ll furnish accommodations. Troops don’t have to go to houses because the houses come to them. Everything is the other way round. While they’re on their way back to Catskill Landing they’ll meet a house and we’ll put them in it and send them back to camp.”
“Good idea,” Hervey shouted; “accommodations delivered while you wait; take your house home with you. Let’s all climb up on the top of it.”
“Wait a minute,” Warde said, “this man thinks we’re crazy. Do you mean what you say? If you do I’ll talk to him.”
“We mean a good deal more than what we say,” I said; “that’s a good suggestion of Pee-wee’s and I say let’s follow it. No troop shall leave Temple Camp on account of a house. If they come along the road they shall not pass. We’ll put them in the house and send them back. We defy everything and everybody. What do we care about the housing shortage?”
Warde said, “Well then, keep still a minute and let me talk to the man.” He has a lot of sense, Warde has, I’m glad I’m not him.
He said, “Hey, mister, we’re boy scouts and we belong at Temple Camp that’s over there in the woods near Black Lake. This road goes around through Hink’s Junction and around through Pine Hollow to the camp. We were going to take the short cut through the woods but we followed this house instead. So now we think we’d like to buy it and we’ll take it to Temple Camp.”
“We’ll take turns carrying it,” Garry said.
Warde said, “Will you keep still so he’ll know we’re in earnest?”
“It............