Soon he reached the town, and there in the center of a spacious lawn was something which, in his loneliness and uncertainty, seemed the picture of gloom.  The ruin of a building which had been burned to the ground.  What a fire that must have been to witness!  Better far than The Bandit of Harrowing Highway!  Over a partly fallen arch, under which many reluctant feet had passed, Pee-wee could just make out the graven words:  WEST KETCHEM PUBLIC SCHOOL.

West Ketchem.  So that was where he was.  But he had never heard of West Ketchem.  The fame of this lakeside metropolis had not penetrated to surging Bridgeboro.  At least it had’ not penetrated to the surging mind of Scout Harris.  He tried to recall West Ketchem on the map of New Jersey in his school geography.

But evidently West Ketchem had scorned the geography.  Or else the geography had scorned West Ketchem.

Undecided what to do, Pee-wee lingered a few moments among the mass of charred timbers, and desks ruined and laid, low, and broken blackboards, all in an indiscriminate heap.

“I bet the fellers that live here are glad,” he said to himself.  “That isn’t saying they have to believe in fires, except camp-fires, but anyway after it’s all over they’ve got a right to be glad.”

The situation of the school seemed to have been a sort of compromise between the claims of the lake and the claims of the town.  It was not too far from the town and not too far from the lake.  Perhaps it had been built within sight of the lake so that the West Ketchem student body could see it while at their lessons.  A kind of slow torture.

Pee-wee had never before seen the familiar realities of school life thus brought low and lying in inglorious disorder at his feet.  It gave him a feeling of triumph and had a fascination for him.  Damp smelling books were here and there among the ruins, histories, arithmetics, algebras and grammars.  He could tread upon these with his valiant heel.  A huge roll call book (ah, how well he knew it even in the darkness) lay charred and soggy near the assembly-room piano.  Junk heaps had always had a fascination for Pee-wee and had yielded up some of his rarest treasures.  But a school, with all its disciplinary claptrap reduced to a junk heap!  He could not, even in this late hour and strange country, tear himself away from it.

But another influence caused him to hesitate.  What should he do?  There were hardly any lights in the town now.  He was a scout and he could not reconcile himself to the commonplace device of going to someone’s house and asking for shelter.  His scout training had taught him self-reliance and resource, and here was the chance to apply them, to go home, to find his way without anyone’s help.  The lonely road called to him more than the dark houses did.

But how about the car?  Mr. Bartlett’s stolen car?  Would it be the way of a scout to go home and tell about that?  He had come in the car, Providence had made him its guardian, and he would take it back again and say, (or words to this effect) “Here is your super six Hunkajunk car, Mr. Bartlett; they tried to steal it but I foiled them!  I was disguised as a buffalo robe.”