ed was the
most wonderful scout that ever lived. He wondered how it would seem to
know him all the time. Peter had no idea what a distributer was, but he
knew now that _his_ method of crippling an automobile was very crude. He
was glad they did not know so they could not laugh at him....

After the Packard car, with its noisy load, had started for that fairy
region where they had movie shows and things and where Scout Harris
lived, Peter was beset by an awful problem. He was not sleepy, he would
not be sleepy for at least a year after what he had seen, and he
intended to watch the car as it should be watched. The question that
puzzled him was whether he dared get into it or whether he had better
sit on the old carriage step. He finally compromised by sitting on the
running board. And there he sat till the owl stopped shrieking and the
first pale herald of the dawn appeared in the sky.

And when the sun peaked over the top of Graveyard Hill and painted the
tombstones below with its fresh new light and showed the gray frost of
the autumn morning spread over the lonesome, bleak fields, and finally
cast its cheery light upon the tiny, isolated home, it found Peter
Piper, pioneer scout, of Piper's Crossroads, seated there upon the
running board of Scoutmaster Ned's car, waiting for one more glimpse of
those heroes....

CHAPTER XXXII

ON TO BRIDGEBORO

Scoutmaster Ned Garrison had a middle name. Handling parents, that was
his middle name. He was a bear at that. He could make them eat out of
his hand. Had he not engineered the camping enterprise pending the
preparation of a makeshift school? Parents did not trouble him, he ate
them alive.

"You leave them to me," he said to Pee-wee as they advanced against poor
defenseless Bridgeboro. "They'll either consent or we'll shoot up the
town, hey, Safety First? We're on the rampage to-night; somebody's been
feeding us meat."

It was not Pee-wee's custom to leave a thing to somebody else. He
attended to everything--meals, awards, hikes, ice cream cones, camping
localities, duffel lists, parents, everything. He was the world's
champion fixer. You can see for yourselves what a triumph he made of not
rescuing the wrong car. That was merely a detail. If the car had been
the right one and no one had stopped him from rescuing it he would have
rescued it. Since everything worked out all right, he was triumphant.
And he was better than glue for fixing things.

"I'll handle