under a stone wall. They're smart, woodchucks are."

"Are they as smart as you?" she wanted to know.

"Smarter," Pee-Wee admitted, generously; "they're smarter than
skunks and even skunks are smarter than I am."

"I like you better than skunks," she said. Wiggle seemed to be of
the same opinion. "I like all the scouts on account of you," she said.

No one could be long in Pee-Wee's company without hearing about
the scouts; he was a walking (or rather a running and jumping)
advertisement of the organization. He told Pepsy about tracking
and stalking and signaling and the miracles of cookery which his
friend Roy Blakeley had performed.

"Can he cook better than you?" Pepsy wanted to know, a bit dubiously.

"Yes, but I can eat more than he can," Pee-Wee said. And that seemed
to relieve her.

"I can make a locust come to me," he added, and suiting the action
to the word he emitted a buzzing sound which brought a poor deluded
locust to his very hand. At such wonder-working she could only gape
and stare. Wiggle appeared to claim the locust as a souvenir of the
scout's magic.

"You let it go, Wiggle," Pee-Wee said. "If you want to be a scout
you can't kill anything that doesn't do any harm. But you can kill
snakes and mosquitoes if you want to." Evidently it was the dream of