ust
_wonderful?_"

So then I rounded up my army of invasion and I shouted, "Scouts and
sprouts, I have squinted yonder tree with my trusty right eye and I find
we have to cross neutral territory again. We have to go through that
house over there----"

"The one with the roof of----" Pee-wee shouted.

I said, "That's the one, the one with the roof. Take a good look at that
house; you'll see it has an inside as well as an outside."

"I can't see the inside," Dorry shouted.

"Can you see the outside?" I asked him. "Well, the inside is just inside
of the outside. If you took the outside away there wouldn't be any
inside. You can do that by algebra."

I said, "There are two stories in that house and we have to put some
adventure into those stories."

Pee-wee shouted, "I'll go ahead and ring the bell and tell them we want
to go through, hey? Because I know what to say." Then he said to the
girls, "You can watch me if you want to. Maybe some time you'll be on a
bee-line hike and want to go through a house and then you'll know just
how to do."

One of them said, "Oh, thank you so much."

"The pleasure is ours," I told her. "If the civilized population wants
to follow us, what do we care?"

Then I said, "Ready--_go_!"

We all marched across the green with Pee-wee ahead of us and those girls
coming along behind, laughing. You couldn't blame them because the kid
looked awful funny--very brave and bold. We all stopped on the walk in
front of the house. It was a dandy big house; it looked like one of
those houses that has a hall running straight through to the back.
That's the kind of neutral territory I like.

The kid marched straight up to the steps and up onto the porch and
pushed the button. "That's one thing you have to learn when you're a
scout," he called down, "not to be afraid."

All of a sudden the front door opened and, _g-o-o-d night, magnolia_!
There was the biggest colored man I ever saw. He was about six feet tall
and eight feet in circumference, or maybe it was the other way round, I
don't know which. His face was so black that it would make a blackboard
look pale. You could have written on that man's face with chalk, dandy.
He had on a kind of a uniform with brass buttons and his elbows stuck
out on each side of him.

"Good night," Hunt said; "that's one mountain we didn't figure on."

I said, "I guess that's one of the Black Hills. I wonder how it got out
of my geography."

Pee-wee looked like