"I"m pretty well," called Pee-wee.
"What are we going to do?" asked Townsend. "The tide has beat us to it. He"s safe enough."
"Oh, he couldn"t be safer," said Warde. "Our name is mud. All our rowing for nothing."
"How about the eats over there, Kid?" Warde called.
"They"re all right," called Pee-wee, "only the ice cream is starting to melt. I stuck my finger in through the ice and the cream is kind of oozing out. Maybe I better eat it, hey? It won"t hold out till the tide comes in. I ate a sandwich and that made me thirsty and I didn"t want to be drinking the lemonade so I ate a piece of ice out of the freezer and that made me more thirsty so I drank some lemonade anyway and that made me hungry again and I"m going to eat a sardine sandwich only I"m afraid that"ll make me thirsty and----"
"This is horrible," said Townsend; "it"s like an endless chain. Where will the end be?"
"Do you think it would be all right for me to eat some chicken salad?"
Pee-wee shouted. "The tide won"t be high enough to float this island for two hours."
"Don"t!" called Warde, stopping up his ears. "Have a heart."
"Have a what?" called Pee-wee.
"Have a doughnut," shouted Roy.
"All right," called Pee-wee. "There"s some dandy cheese here in a kind of a little jar--_yum--yum_!"
"Don"t!" shrieked Warde.
"Doughnut?" called Pee-wee.
"No, I said "_don"t_"," called Warde. "You"ll have me eating one of the oarlocks in a minute."
Soon a faint chugging could be heard; it ceased, presumably at the Skybrow lawn, then started again. Nearer and nearer it came until presently the racing boat of Dashway Speeder came to a stop alongside them. Half a dozen girls and as many hungry male guests of the party were in it clamoring for news.
"This is terrible!" said Minerva. "I never _dreamed_ of such a thing as this. Why, he"s _marooned_!"
"I"m all safe," shouted Pee-wee, "don"t you worry."
"_Safe_! I should think he is," said Dora. "If he had the British navy all around him he couldn"t be safer."
"The world is at his feet," said Townsend.
"You mean at his mouth," said Roy.
"I never heard of such a thing in all my born days," said Margaret.
"He"s cornered the food market," said another hungry guest.
"For goodness" sake turn your search-light on him, Dashway," said Minerva, "and let"s see what he looks like. This is simply _tragic_."
Dashway Speeder turned the search-light of his launch across the fiats and there amid the surrounding mud, still bubbling from the effects of the departing tide, was presented a scene like unto a picture on a movie screen. There, bathed in light amid the surrounding gloom, like a film star in a disk of brightness, sat Scout Harris upon a grocery box surrounded by fallen sandwiches and with a goodly bowl securely held between his diminutive knees. It was a superb and mouth-watering close-up, to use the film phrase.
"I--I might as well eat some things, hey?" me lone voyager called.
"Because it"s past time for refreshments anyway and the tide won"t carry me off for more than two hours and everybody"ll be going home then and the ice cream is starting to melt, the lemon ice is getting all soft, so will it be all right to start eating the chicken salad and the sandwiches and things? I only kind of sort of tested them so far."
Warde Hollister stopped up his ears in an agony of torture while a dozen famishing boys flopped this way and that in att.i.tudes of suffering despair.
"Yes, it will be all right," called poor Minerva in a kind of desperation. "It"s the only thing, you might as well." She seemed resigned if not reconciled. "You might as well eat the ice cream anyway, it will only melt."
"And the chicken salad?" called the merciless hero, "and the sandwiches, too?"
"_Oh, this is too much_," moaned Connie Bennett.
"It isn"t so much as you might think," shouted Pee-wee.
"He must be hollow from head to foot," said Margaret.
"Yes, eat everything," wailed Minerva in the final spirit of utter resignation.
"Yum--yum," called Pee-wee. "Oh, boy, it"s good."
And still the man in the moon winked down, and smiled his merry scout smile upon Scout Harris.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DREAM OF KEEKIE JOE
On that night, in the back yard of Billy Gilson"s tire repair shop, Keekie Joe, the sentinel of Barrel Alley, sat upon a pile of old Ford radiators, untangling a complicated ma.s.s of fishing-line. He was trying to follow a selected strand through the various fastnesses of the labyrinth.
The involved ma.s.s was really not a fishing-line but, in its untangled state, an apparatus for confounding and enraging pedestrians.
Stretched across the sidewalk between two tin cans its function was to catch in the feet of pa.s.sersby, thus pulling the clamorous cans about the ankles of the victim. Keekie Joe had always found this game diverting and he was wont to vary its surprises by filling the cans with muddy water.
But on this eventful night he was driven to dismantle the apparatus and consecrate it to a new use. For Keekie Joe was hungry and he dared not go home; so he was going fishing.
The hours following the c.r.a.p game had not been golden hours for the sentinel of Barrel Alley. When he emerged from the tenement and rejoined Pee-wee after the episode of the c.r.a.p game, he had ten cents that his father had given him with which to buy a package of cigarettes.
Keekie Joe was never able to consider consequences at a distance of more than ten minutes into the future. When he played hooky from school on Thursday it never occurred to him that he would be answerable to the powers that be on Friday. Notwithstanding that he was a sentinel he could never look ahead. And when Keekie Joe smoked several of his father"s cigarettes on the way home, it never occurred to him that he would have to remain away from home through supper time, and until his father had retired for the night.
Thus it was that at nine o"clock or thereabouts, Keekie Joe realized that he was hungry and that four cigarettes stood between him and home, effectually barring the way. He measured the licking that he would get against the supper that he would get, and he decided to go fishing. No doubt his choice was well considered for the supper that he would get might not be a good one whereas the licking that he would get would be nothing short of magnificent.
Keekie Joe had not the slightest idea how to cook a fish and he could not think so far ahead as that. But food he must have. So he had dug some worms and put them in one of his trick cans and then proceeded to untangle the line. Having secured an unknotted length of five or six feet he equipped this with a fish-hook of his own manufacture and sallied forth toward the river. He was not only hungry, but sleepy, and it never occurred to him that this was the exorbitant price of four cigarettes.
Hunger and sleep vied with each other in the shuffling body of Keekie Joe as he crossed Main Street and cut across the fields toward the marshes.
Down by the river was a little shanty in which was a ma.s.s of fishing seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified crust of bread, ancient remnant of some fisherman"s lunch, might be in the place.
Once Keekie Joe had found such a crust there. But the place was bare now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with dust. These and the ma.s.s of net upon the ground were all that Keekie Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks in the weather-beaten boards.
And now again Keekie Joe had to make a choice. He was hungry, oh, so hungry. But he was sleepy, too, to the point of blinking half-consciousness. The eyes which had so often watched for "cops,"