It was about nine o’clock in the morning when I started on that crazy trail and it was about five o’clock in the afternoon when the tide began to turn and go back.  All the while I was sitting there waiting I thought about the Indian that owned that canoe.  Maybe his bones were down underneath there, I thought.  Ugh, I’d like to see them.  No, I wouldn’t.  Maybe he was on his way to a pow-wow, hey?

Well, after a while when the tide turned I started paddling down.  A little water came through a couple of deep cracks, but not much and I sopped it up with my hat.  But oh, jingoes, I never had to sit up so straight in school (not even when the principal came through the class-room) as I did in that cranky old log with a hole in it.  And oh, you would have chucked a couple of chuckles if you’d seen me guiding my Indian bark with a bunch of reeds.  Honest, they looked like, a street sweeper’s broom.

After a while the creek began to get wider and then I could see far ahead of me the roof of a house.  Then, all of a sudden, I heard somebody shout.

“Don’t bother to plug the hole up, leave it the way it is, so if the water comes in, it can get out again.”

Then I heard a voice shout, “You’re crazy!” and I knew it was the fellows jollying Pee-wee Harris and they were talking about a hole in the boat, because that was the roof I saw.  So then I knew I was coming out into Dutch Creek right where it passes Little Valley.

Oh, boy!  Wasn’t I excited?  Pretty soon I could see the boat and some of the fellows on it working away, sawing and hammering and jollying each other, the way the fellows in our troop are always doing.  You can see by the map just how I got to where they were.  I guess I must have been as near as fifty feet before Connie Bennett threw down his hammer and shouted.  “Look who’s here!”

Westy Martin was sitting on the edge of the deck dangling his feet and eating a sandwich.  Well, you ought to have seen them all stare.

“What in the dickens do you call this?” Wig Weigand hollered.

But I didn’t say a word till I got right close to them, then I gave Westy a good swat with my reed paddle.

“I am Weetonka, the famous Indian chief!”, I shouted, “and I haven’t had anything to eat since eight o’clock.  Give me that sandwich or I’ll scalp you!”

CHAPTER VIII

RESOPEKITWAFTENLY

This chapter and the next one are mostly about Wigley Weigand, but we usually call him Wig-Wag Weigand, because he’s a cracker-jack on wig-wag signalling.  He’s good on all the different kinds of signalling.  He’s a Raven, but he can’t help that, because there wasn’t any Silver Fox Patrol when the Raving Ravens started.

The Ravens were the—­what do you call it—­you know what I mean—­nucleus of the troop.  That’s how it started.  There are about half a million scouts in America and all of them can’t be Silver Foxes, even if they’d like to.