“All I had was my copy of Initiation Drill,” he said.

“Why didn’t you drill a hole in the boat then,” I said.

“What for?”, Pee-wee shouted.

“So the water could get out as fast as it came in”.

“What are you talking about?  You’re crazy!” he yelled.

“There should be two holes in every boat,” Connie Bennet said, in that slow way he has; “one for the water to come in and the other so it can get out.”

Gee-williger!  You should have seen Pee-wee.

Anyway, I suppose you think by this time that we’re all crazy.  I should worry.

CHAPTER XIII

TRACKING

Anyway, you can bet I didn’t stay there long, because I wanted to find out if Wig’s signal had been received.  Maybe you won’t understand, but down the river it seemed all right and I was sure somebody must have caught it.  But after we landed and I started up home, it seemed as if it was just kind of playing, after all, because that’s the way some people think about the scouts, so I hurried as fast as I could so that my mother and father wouldn’t be worrying.  I felt awfully funny, kind of, as I went up the lawn because I knew that if no one had come and told them about the signal, they’d think I was dead.

They were sitting on the porch waiting for me and I knew from the way my mother put her arms around me that they had been worrying.  She asked we what had kept me so late and my father said that I ought to send them some word when I was going to stay out as late as midnight.  I have to admit he was right, too.

But anyway, I knew that they hadn’t received any word about me from anybody, and I was all up in the air about that.  I could see that Jake Holden hadn’t been there at all and that nobody had come and told them about the signal, either.  I didn’t exactly ask them, but I could tell it all the same.  So I told them all about everything that happened, about how I got caught in the marsh and all that, and especially about Wig being such a hero.  Then she cried a little, kind of, and I said there was no use crying because I was home all right.  But anyway, she cried just the same, and hugged me awful tight just as if everything hadn’t ended all right.  That’s a funny thing about mothers.

So then I went to bed and I lay awake thinking about everything that happened.  What I thought about most was why Jake Holden hadn’t come and told my mother and father like I heard him say he was going to do.  You remember how I heard him say that.  So that was a mystery—­that’s what Pee-wee would call it.  And I was wondering why he hadn’t come to the house to give them that note he had found.  Because I knew Jake Holden (he always called me “Scouty”) and he liked me, too, and I knew he would sure have come to the house if something hadn’t happened.

Now that I was all calmed down, as you might say, I wasn’t surprised any more about no one reading the signal, because maybe it didn’t show very plain in Bridgeboro and anyway, most grown people seem to think that signalling and all that kind of thing are lots of fun for scouts, but not much use except when grown people, and especially the navy, do it.