TROUBLES OF MY OWN—­THE BIG CONCLAVE

Well, here I am at last, ready to tell you the adventures of our young lives.  Right away I have trouble with Pee-wee Harris.  He’s about as easy to keep down as a balloon full of gas.  We call him the young dirigible because he’s always going up in the air.  Even at the start he must stick in his chapter heading about a conclave.

Hanged if I know what a conclave is.  It’s some kind of a meeting I guess.  He said it was something like a peace conference, but believe me, the meeting I’m going to tell you about wasn’t much like a peace conference.  I told him I’d use my own heading and his too, just to keep him quiet.  I think he’s got his pockets stuffed full of chapter headings and that he’ll be shooting them at me all the way through—­like a machine—­gun.

I guess I might as well tell you about Pee-wee before I tell you about the conclave or whatever you call it He’s Doctor Harris’s son and he’s a member of the Raven Patrol.  He’s a member in good standing, only he doesn’t stand very high.  Honest, you can hardly see him without a magnifying glass.  But for voice—­good night!

He sings in the Methodist Church choir and they say he can throw his voice anywhere.  I wish he’d throw it in the ash barrel, I know that.  He always wears his belt-axe to troop meetings, in case the Germans should invade Bridgeboro, I suppose.  He’s the troop mascot and if you walk around him three times and ruffle up his beautiful curly hair, you can change your luck.

Well, now I’ll tell you about the meeting.  We had a big special meeting to decide about two things, and believe me, those two things had momentous consequences.  Momentous—­that’s a good word, hey?

One thing, we wanted to decide about our campaign for collecting books for soldiers, and another thing, we wanted to decide how we could all go up to Temple Camp in our cabin launch, the Good Turn.

This large arid what—­do—­you—­call—­it launch—­I mean commodious launch—­is a dandy boat, except for one thing—­the bow is too near the stern.  If we were sardines instead of boy scouts, it would be all right, but you see there’s twenty-four of us altogether, not counting Captain Kidd, our mascot—­he’s a parrot.

So I got up and said, “How are we going to crowd twenty—­four growing boys and a parrot into a twenty foot launch?”

“It can’t be did,” Doc Carson shouted.  “Then some of us will have to hike it on our dear little feet,” I said.

“Or else we’ll have to get a barge or something or other and tow it,” Artie Van Arlen said.

“What, with a three horse-power engine?” somebody else shouted.

“You can bet I won’t be one of the ones to hike it,” Pee-wee yelled; “I’ll dope out some scheme or other.”

And believe me, he did.

Well, after we’d been talking about an hour or so on how we’d manage it, Mr. Ellsworth, our scoutmaster, up and said there was plenty of time for that as long as we were not going to camp for a couple of weeks anyway, and that we’d better begin thinking of how we were going to start about collecting books for soldiers.