But as fast as I tried to go, I met an interruption on the way up Providence Road, that was agreeable although detaining from duty.  Tony and Pink and Sam stopped me and told me that they were just on their way to bring me to the Crotch, and that I would be the first strange person that had ever seen it, since they had fixed it up in the Luttrell barn loft to have Scout meetings in.  Mr. Douglass had planned and helped them with it, and they said there never was such a place of interest in Byrdsville.  The reason they were going to show me was that I must get the empty room over the garage Father has turned the old family stable of the Byrds into, to make a wigwam for the Paleface Patrol to have meetings and keep things in.  They had asked Mamie Sue to go with me because it would take two girls to remember all they saw, and that would be the last time we could come there, though they would come often to the Wigwam if we wanted them to show us how to be as scouty as possible.

Just then Mamie Sue came up, and she either snorted with indignation or choked with candy, I cannot tell which; but because we had to, we accepted their kind invitation with gratitude.  We stopped at the house first and told Mrs. Luttrell we were going to the barn with the boys, and she said not to get hurt or fall, and gave us a tea-cake all around.  Mamie Sue held the plate and happened to get two, not at all by intention, for they were stuck together.

Tony swung up from the horse trough to the loft by a pole, while Sam and Pink stayed to push us up.  I went up just as easily as Tony did, before they had time to push me one inch, but poor Mamie Sue stuck halfway through the trap-door and we thought we would never be able to get her either up or down without calling out the fire-company, as Sam suggested; but she kept astonishingly cool herself and wiggled in just the way Tony told her to, and at last got up.  She said she knew that she could fall down all right, when the time came to go, so for us not to worry about that, and we proceeded to enjoy the Crotch.

I never dreamed boys could get together so many remarkable things and make it so interesting to tell about them.  The big kettle to boil water and the poles and the sticks and the blankets and tin cups and plates were in one corner and a shelf held the knapsacks with the “first aid” things in the opposite corner.  All of Sam’s bird-eggs, the collection of which he had seen the error of, and had to give up when he became a Scout, was on a table by the window, and his butterflies were pinned on large pieces of brown paper on the wall and looked like a beautiful decoration.

And while we looked at the things it had taken the boys so long to collect, I rejoiced that I could manage to spend a lot of money to fix up the Wigwam, and told them about each thing that I could buy, as I thought it up, from seeing something that they had.

“Say, Bubble, is the long pole for exercise going to be braced so the Dumpling can go over without danger?” said Tony, in the teasing voice he uses to girls, that doesn’t make them mad.