All of a sudden, Pee-wee stopped short. Gee whiz, I thought he had found the treasure.
“I know how to reduce the area of search!” he shouted.
“All right, go ahead and reduce it,” Harry told him.
“Listen—all listen!” the kid said. “I have a—you know—one of those things——”
“We don’t need to hunt on both sides of the track,” the kid shouted, “because I can do a deduction—a good one. Do you remember that bullet hole in the side of the car? If the bullet came through there and hit that man Thor, then he must have been riding with the seat frontways, and if that seat was frontways on a train going south, it means he must have been on the left side of the car. We don’t need to bother about looking in the woods on the other side of the track at all. _All_ come over on this side. I reduced the airplane of search—I mean the area.”
For about half a minute, Harry just stood there thinking, and then he said, “I’m hanged if you’re not right, Pee-wee. How did you happen to evolve that in your noodle? You’re a bully little scout.” Then he said, “I’ve often noticed that if a fellow is a scout, he’s a scout more than he is anything else. He may be a motor-boatist or a motorist or a tennis player, he may be a catcher or a pitcher or a sodalogist——”
“An ice-cream soda specialist,” he said. “But when it comes to a showdown, a scout is just a scout and that’s all there is to it. Am I right?”
“Thou never spakest a truer word,” I told him. “Being a scout is like a 1916 Ford—you never can get rid of it.”
“That’s the idea,” Harry said; “a scout’s a scout and there you are.”
“He’s a friend to everything that lives,” little Alf sang out; “it says so in the book.”
So then we all kept to the one side of the track, and we were saved a lot of trouble by Pee-wee’s deduction. The kid is sure great on deduction—and movies. And his favorite hero is apple pie. Gee williger, I guess we could pretty near feed Austria with the war tax he pays down at the Lyric Theatre. Harry says if Pee-wee were to stop eating, the price of everything would go down. Anyway, he controls the wheat market—eating nine wheat cakes at a sitting. But he’s great on deduction.
One thing, Harry was sure right when he said that when it comes to a showdown a scout is a scout—I have to admit it. Anyway, it seemed kind of natural like, to be walking through those woods; it seemed just like at Temple Camp. You wouldn’t have known there was a village within a couple of hundred miles. Gee, I’m not saying anything against the Cadillac, but I like to hike; I’d rather hike than ride in a machine. I guess that’s because I’m a scout, hey? Especially I like hiking through the woods. Sitting on a porch, that’s one thing I hate. I hate algebra, too. My father says it’s good to know algebra, even if you don’t want to be especially good friends with it. I’ll let it alone if it’ll let _me_ alone—that’s what I told him. Anyway, it was dandy in those Woods.