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last second to avoid a collision.
"Why are we turning around, Miss Scrimmage?" asked Cathy. Diane and the other
girls looked nervous.
"This is definitely the wrong way!" she said, flustered. "The road to
Montreal is a big highway! This is just two lanes. It looks awfully rural  "
"Maybe we're taking the northern route to see more of the countryside,"
suggested Diane hopefully.
Miss Scrimmage stopped dead. Behind them, the Camaro screeched to a halt
again, three inches off the van's back bumper. The driver stuck his head out
the window. "What are you  crazy , lady?"
Miss Scrimmage scratched her head. "Well, perhaps that was my thinking," she
mused over the din of the Camaro's horn behind them. Finally she reached a
decision and wheeled the van hard about, just as the Camaro attempted to drive
around her. Both vehicles stopped, facing each other head-on, front bumpers an
inch apart.
Now it was Miss Scrimmage's turn to honk. "Sir, you are blocking my path,"
she called out the window. "What is more, you are on the wrong side of the
road."
Face flaming, the other motorist emitted a stream of insults and abuse.
Miss Scrimmage never got beyond "You lunatic& "
"Well, I never!" she exclaimed, wheeling around the Camaro and tearing off
down the highway at breakneck speed. She began a lecture to her girls on the
ladylike way to deal with "a horribly abusive ignoramus who was probably born
in a barn and drives unsafely besides." She was fifty miles down the road
before she realized that she didn't know where she was going.
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The van screeched to a halt in a cloud of burning rubber.
"What's the problem, Miss Scrimmage?" asked Diane.
The Headmistress looked haunted. She peered through the windshield as though
hoping to spy Montreal waiting right around the next bend. Instead, she got
northeastern Ontario, lots of it, as far as the eye could see. "We can't go
this way," she said softly.
Cathy spoke up. "Well, can we gothis way?" She pointed back in the direction
they had come from.
Miss Scrimmage looked in the rearview mirror. The scene was almost exactly
the same. "No," she barely whispered.
Cathy leaned forward and patted the Headmistress sympathetically on the
shoulder. "Don't worry, Miss Scrimmage. We know where we're going."
Miss Scrimmage put the van in gear.
***
"Well, sure, it's sort of an okay raft, I guess," said Calvin, "but how come
you didn't usemy tree?"
"Yours was too small," said Coach Flynn.
"Too small?!" roared Calvin. "It was the mightiest tree in the forest!"
That got a big laugh.
"You cut it down with the scissors on your Swiss army knife," Wilbur pointed
out.
"It was a colossus!"
"It was a twig."
The S.O.S. raft was now finished, and all the boys were pretty proud of
themselves. It was made up of saplings about four inches in diameter, tied
together with twine from the survival kits, and measured a little more than
eight feet square. On one end. Bruno had scratched the inscription
S.S.Drown-in-the-Woods II .
Bruno, Boots, and Jordie were hard at work cutting the lettersH, E, L , andP
out of Wilbur's bright red long underwear. They would secure these to the top
of the raft with pine gum, as Jordie had done in last summer's blockbuster
movieMarooned in the Swamp .
"You should have doneS.O.S .," grumbled Wilbur. "You might run out of
material with four letters, and you'renot getting my T-shirt."
Bruno emitted a bark of laughter. "Are you kidding? We could putAssistance
Required as Soon as Possible , and still have enough stuff left over to cut
out all our names!"
"Very funny."
Once finished, the raft would go out into the middle of the lake to shout its
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message to the sky and, with luck, to rescuers. If that didn't work, Calvin
was stillvolunteering to paddle to Greenland, and no hard feelings.
"What if it doesn't float?" asked Pete nervously.
"Then it'll sink," said Larry. "At least it'll have a lot of company down
there."
"Of course it'll float, Anderson," snapped Flynn. "Wood floats."
"Hey, Elmer," piped Boots, "how about that one?" He was referring to a loud
hissing sound that seemed to come from the woods all around them.
"Locusts," said Elmer. "Probably the first ones of the season. They don't
usually appear this far north until June."
Ever since the night of the birdcalls, it had become a game around camp to
see if Elmer could identify every single noise the forest had to offer. So
far, the genius hadn't been stumped once.
"Are you sure he really knows all that stuff?" Jordie whispered to Boots. "If
he made it up, we wouldn't know the difference."
"You just don't know Elmer," Boots replied. "He's smart enough to know that
junk and a hundred times more, but he doesn't have the imagination to fake one
answer."
The chirping call of a bird rang through the clearing. All eyes turned to
Elmer.
"Blue jay," supplied the crew-cut genius. "Adult male."
Sure enough, a bright blue bundle of feathers flashed briefly out of the
trees, then just as quickly disappeared.
"See?" laughed Boots. "He's always right."
* * *
Miss Scrimmage screeched the van to a halt diagonally across route 60. "I
cant turn left here!" she exclaimed, staring in consternation at her
directions. "That's a dirt road! Catherine, are you sure the man at the gas
station said this was the right way?"
Cathy nodded positively. "This is it."
The Headmistress was totally distressed. "But Montreal is a large city with
buildings, and people, and delightful little shops where they serve
buttercroissants ! Where are they?"
"Maybe they're at the other end of this road," Diane suggested.
"Maybe," said Miss Scrimmage dubiously. But she was terribly upset. And as
the road became bumpier and muddier, her agitation grew. "We're lost! Oh, my [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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