HE GOES TO CONQUER
They found a good camping place a little farther along, parked Lizzie at
the side of the road, and ate their late supper with a relish. (Fried
bacon, toast, marmalade, and rice cakes with _exasperated_ milk on them,
to use Pee-wee’s own word.)
Pee-wee said that he always liked supper after adventures, but that he
also liked it before adventures. There was only one thing about supper
that he did not like and that was that after he had eaten it he wasn’t
hungry any more.
Inspired by the hot meal and the spirit of their little camp-fire, he
enlarged on his adventure of the evening and listened to Townsend’s less
harrowing narrative of his own arraignment for “driving a motor vehicle
without a license” and so forth and so forth and so forth. He had been
dismissed with a reprimand and told not to be caught again in the State
of New York without his card.
“Don’t you care,” said Pee-wee, wrestling with a queer specimen of
culinary architecture which might have been a club sandwich struck by a
cyclone; “if they stop us now we won’t care, because we’ve got the
letter and anyway I’ve got an idea, I just thought of it. If you could
kind of be disguised as a grown-up person, sort of, with a regular coat
on or something like that, probably they wouldn’t stop us unless we ran
into another offensive drive—”
“Intensive,” said Townsend.
“So wouldn’t that be a good idea?”
“It would be a good idea, Kid, only I haven’t got any disguise. And we
haven’t got any gasoline either, if anybody should ask you. I doubt if
we can make the village I just came from; we’re up against it. It beats
anything how it holds out. I’d start out to-night again only I’m afraid
we’d get stuck in the road and I don’t want to get stuck in the road at
night. There’s a gas station in a barn about a mile up the road; there’s
a big boarding-house there, but I hate like the dickens to—”
“Scouts can’t ask favors,” Pee-wee shouted. They’re supposed to have
resources and—”
“Well, my resources are just a dime at present,” said Townsend.
“Listen,” shouted Pee-wee, “I’ve got an inspiration. It’s a dandy idea.
All we need is ten cents and a big boarding-house!”
“Do you make gasoline by mixing those together?” Townsend asked. “Take
one large boarding-house, stir thoroughly, and add ten—”
“_You’re crazy_—listen! There are lots of women at boarding-houses,
aren’t there? They’ve all got scissors and things to be sharpened. Last
year when I was at Snailsdale Manor Farm a man came around sharpening
knives and scissors and things, ten cents each. He made a lot of money.
Listen, Townsend, you stop laughing and listen—wait till I finish eating
this rice cake and I’ll tell you—you—you—maybe even we don’t need ten
cents. Have you got any emery cloth—for spark-plugs and things?”
“I guess I could scare up a couple of sheets.”
“Then all we have to do—_listen_—all we have to do is—have you got rims
that come off? Sure you have. All we have to do is jack up the back
wheels and take the tire and the rim off one of them and tack emery
cloth all the way round; it’ll last to sharpen about twenty pairs of
scissors and things. Gee whiz, it’s better to have resources than go
asking favors, isn’t it? We’ll make a great hit, _you see_! You be the
one to sharpen the things and I’ll be the one to shout, hey?”
The proposal to turn one of the rear wheels of his flivver into a
grindstone at first struck Townsend as preposterous but on reflecting he
saw no reason why this could not be done. Emery cloth, tacked on the
edge of a wheel would not last long, but it would last a little while,
and if business was good they could probably get some more emery cloth
at the village where the big boarding-house was. The element of comedy
which their outlandish device would have would in itself be something of
a drawing card. The world likes to see people (especially boys) original
and industrious. It always pays its tribute to ingenuity.
“It’ll be a kind of a show, too,” Pee-wee said.
And, indeed, so it proved. Pee-wee knew his public. He had enlivened the
tedium of summer boarding-houses before, but this proved his master
stroke. It was “just what they wanted,” to quote the advertisements.
Early in the morning they set forth, the gasoline so low in the tank
that Townsend, wriggle and jounce as he would, could not arouse an
answering splash from the depths below him. “There’s just about enough
to take a grease spot out with,” he said cheerily. In the promising
sunshine of Pee-wee’s presence he seemed to have regained his wonted
spirit.
“You leave them to me,” Pee-wee said; “you let me do the talking, see?”
Townsend agreed to this since there was no way of preventing it. “Right
after breakfast they always come out on the porch and sew and do things
like that; some of them take constitutions but most of them sew. That’s
the time to catch them.”
“Constitutionals, Kid.”
“What’s the difference?”
At the tactical hour of 9:30 A. M. a dilapidated, topless flivver might
have been seen and heard moving up the winding private road to Brookside
Villa. It made no attempt to steal upon the summer boarders unaware, but
rattled and squeaked, and proclaimed its coming to the world.
Townsend, hatless as usual and wearing his gray flannel shirt, sat
upright at the wheel with a humorous complacency which added a piquant
touch to his hobo vehicle. Pee-wee was resplendent in his full scout
regalia, merit badges and all.
Under the spell of his new enterprise, he had subjected his kit to
another upheaval in order to procure his best scout suit. Also he had
taken up one of the floor boards of the poor Ford and with a piece of
black chalk used for making scout signs, had printed on it in glaring
letters:
Knives and things sharpened by machinery.
He had, on second thought (or, to be more exact, on fourth thought)
decided, for sufficient reasons, to omit the word scissors and include
it under the general heading of _things_. This sign he hung like a
banner on his scout staff and bore aloft like some doughty crusader of
old as he sat beside Townsend in the flivver.
But the people sitting on the lawn and porches of the big old-fashioned
house knew not what was going on in the heart of our redoubtable young
hero as they saw the festive caravan approach and, giving a spasmodic
medley of squeaks and rattles, stop before the main porch.
“Suppose we haven’t got gas enough to grind one scissors,” Pee-wee
whispered.
“It will only take four or five revolutions of the wheel to do that,”
said Townsend. “Half a pint of gas ought to earn us the price of four or
five gallons.”
“Leave them to me,” said Pee-wee darkly.