CHAPTER XI

GETTING ACQUAINTED

Pee Wee was the boy who first "took up" the chums from Clinton. The fat boy sat on the steps of the doctor's house, idly whistling and twiddling his fingers when Bobby and Fred came out. Perry Wise never stood when he could sit, and never walked when he could stand, and never ran when walking would get him to his goal just as well. He was the picture of peace just now.

"Hello, fellows!" he said.

"Hello!" returned Bobby.

"Is the Old Doc goin' to let you stay?" grinned the fat boy.

"Huh! why shouldn't he?" demanded Fred, quick to take offense.

"Cause you're so terrible green," chuckled Pee Wee. "They let the sheep loose sometimes to crop the lawn, and they might eat you."

"Aw--you're too smart," said the abashed Fred.

Bobby only laughed. He was glad to have his mind taken up by something beside the fact of his father's going away.

"Say!" said Pee Wee, cordially. "Don't you want to look over the place?"

"We'd be very glad to," admitted Bobby.

Pee Wee made no effort to rise at first. He merely bawled after another boy who was some distance away:

"Hey, Purdy! Don't you want to beau the greenhorns around?"

Fred Martin doubled his fist again and scowled at the placid fat boy, but Bobby warned him by a shake of the head. The boy addressed, who was smaller than Pee Wee, but who was well out of his reach, turned and made a face at the fat boy, saying:

"Do your own work, Fatty. Don't try to put it off on me."

Pee Wee was quite unmoved by this rough retort. He looked around and hailed another lad:

"Jimmy Ailshine! come on and show the newsies all the lions, will you?"

"For why?" demanded the boy addressed.

"Aw--well--I have a stone bruise," explained Pee Wee, hesitatingly.

"You must have it from sitting so much, then," declared Jimmy, with a loud laugh. "You better take them around yourself, or the captain will be after you."

"You needn't show us about if it is very, very painful," suggested Bobby, beginning to understand the fat boy now.

"Guess we can find our way around alone," grunted Fred.

"Aw well! we won't row about it," said Pee Wee, getting up slowly. "But that stone bruise--"

However, the trouble in question seemed, later, to be of a shifting nature, for first Pee Wee favored his right foot and then his left.

It must be confessed that Perry Wise was a very lazy boy, but he was a good natured one, and when once the exploration party was started, he played the part of show-master very well indeed.

They went through the school rooms and up to the dormitories first. In the second dormitory, where the smaller boys slept, in a pair of twin beds in one corner, Bobby and Fred were billeted.

"And no pillow fights, or other ructions, after 'lights out,' unless you ask the captain first," warned Pee Wee.

"Seems to me this captain has a lot to say around here," growled Fred.

"You bet he has. And what he says he means. And it's not healthy for anybody to do a thing when he says '_don't_.'"

"Why not?" queried Master Fred.

Pee Wee grinned. "You try it if you like," he said. "Then you'll find out. Dr. Raymond says experience is the surest, if not the best, teacher."

The dormitory was a big, light room, cheerfully furnished, with a locker beside each bed for the boy's clothes and personal possessions, and a chair at the head of the bed.

That wall-space over the heads of the beds was considered the private possession of each couple, for the flaunting of banners, photographs, strings of birds-eggs, shells, pine-cone frames, and a hundred other objects of virtu dear to boyish hearts.

"You see, we can hang up a lot of stuff, too, when our trunks come," whispered Fred to Bobby, pointing to the blank spaces over their beds, lettered only with the names: "Blake" and "Martin."

"You can see clear across the lake from the window here," drawled Pee Wee, lolling on a sill.

The chums came to see. Lake Monatook was spread before them--a beautiful, oval sheet of water, with steep, wooded banks in the east, and sloping yellow beaches of sand at the other end.

Where the Rockledge School stood, a steep sandstone cliff dropped right down to a narrow beach, more than fifty feet below. A strong, two-railed fence guarded the brink of this cliff the entire width of the school premises, save where the stairs led down to the boat-house.

In the middle of the lake were several small islands, likewise wooded. The lake was quite ten miles long, and half as wide in its broadest part.

Across from Rockledge School was the village of Belden. On a high bluff over there the new boys saw several red brick buildings among the trees.

"That's Belden School," explained Pee Wee. "We have to beat them at football this fall. We did them up at baseball in the spring. They're a mean set of fellows anyway," added the fat boy. "Once they came across here and stole all our boats. We'll have to get square with them for that, some time."

"Come on," said Fred, who had begun to enjoy pushing the fat boy, now--knowing that he had been set the task of showing them around--and was determined to keep their guide up to the mark. "We don't want to stay here till bedtime, do we?"

"Aw-right," returned Pee Wee, with a groan. "That's my bed next to yours, Blake. Mouser Pryde is chummed on me this year. We call him Mouser because he brought two white mice with him to school when he first came.

"Shiner and Harry Moore have the beds on your other side. Shiner's the chap you saw down stairs--Jimmy Ailshine. He's a good fellow, but awfully lazy," remarked the fat boy, with a sigh.

"What do you call yourself?" demanded Fred, rather impolitely.

"Oh, _me_? I'm not well--honest. And that stone bruise--"

It was then he began to favor the other foot, and Bobby giggled. Pee Wee looked at him solemnly. "What are you laughing at?" he asked.

Bobby pointed out that the stone bruise seemed to have shifted.

"Aw, well! it hurts so bad I feel it in both feet," returned the fat boy, grinning. "Come on."

They went down to the gymnasium. It was a dandy! Bobby and Fred saw that it was a whole lot better than the one Mr. Priestly had for his Boys' Club in the Church House at home.

Then they inspected the outside courts, the ball field, and the cinder track--which was an oval, on the very verge of the cliff.

They met boys everywhere, and Pee Wee told them the names of some of them, while a few of about their own age stopped to speak to Bobby and Fred.

Jack Jinks and the yellow-haired youth, Bill Bronson, came up to the trio of smaller boys as they stood by the railing that defended the cliff's brink.

"So you're showing the greenies around, are you, Fatty?" proposed Jack. "Shown them the stake where the Old Doctor ties up fresh kids and gives them nine and thirty lashes if they as much as whisper in class?"

"Yes," said Pee Wee, nodding. "And I showed them the straps there where _you_ were tied up last term, Jinksey."

"Aw--smart, aren't you?" snarled the squint-eyed boy, while Bill Bronson grinned.

"This red-headed chap's going to be a favorite--I can see that," said Bill, rolling the cap on Fred's head with one hand, but pressing hard enough to hurt.

"Let go of me!" cried Fred, hotly, jerking away.

"Don't you get too presumptuous, sonny," advised the yellow-haired youth. "There's lots of chance for you to get into trouble here."

"If I get into trouble with _you_," snapped Fred, "it won't all be on one side."

"Keep still, Fred!" said Bobby. "Let's come on away," and he tugged at his chum's sleeve.

"That's a pretty fresh kid, too," said Jack, eyeing Bobby with disfavor.

But the trio of younger boys withdrew. "Those fellows," said Pee Wee, "are always picking on fellows they think they can lick. If you don't toady to them, they'll treat you awfully mean!"

"I won't toady to anybody--not even to that captain," declared Fred.

"What! Barry Gray?" cried Pee Wee, in surprise.

"Yes. I don't like him--much," confessed the belligerent Fred.

"You'll be dreadfully lonesome, then," chuckled the fat boy. "For 'most every fellow in the school likes Barry. He's captain of the baseball team, and center in the football team. He can do anything, Barry can. And the Old Doctor thinks he is about right. He was next choice after Tommy Wardwell last year for the Medal of Honor, and he'll likely get it this year."

"What's the Medal of Honor?" asked Fred, curiously.

Pee Wee grinned. "It's something that no red-headed boy ever won," he declared, mysteriously.