"Maybe he won"t stop, hey?" the kid asked me.
"Sure he will," I said; "how does he know how big the pots are? It will knock him silly when he sees that."
Even beyond the screen, away over against a hill, we could see the word POTS printed very dim and small. Only the P was wrong side around.
But anyway, safety first; so I kept moving the gla.s.s so the word danced around. An engineer who couldn"t have seen that must have been blind.
Pretty soon, along she came, and we could see the headlight now, good and clear, and hear her thundering along as if she should worry about anything. _Rattle_, _bang_, she went, and roaring and clanking as if she"d be glad to trample the whole world down and never even stop to take notice. _Slam_, _bang_, she came along, and we could see the mountains as plain as day, brightened up by her headlight.
I just held the gla.s.s, moving it around, and I have to admit I was a little kind of nervous, sort of.
_Slam bang, slam bang!_ She came along and we could hear the rattling and clanking echoing from the mountains, and the racket was all mixed up. Sparks of light were flying up out of the smokestack and we could hear the rails clanking, clanking....
Then the sound of the clanking changed. Then it died down, and there was only the steady rattle, rattle....
She was slowing down.
"We"ve got her, Kid," I said; "sit still, you"ll only fall off. We"ve got her eating out of our hands."
"Clank, clank, clank--clank--clank," she went; then "s-s-s-s-s-s...."
She had stopped.
There she stood, puffing and puffing, part on the bridge, and part back in the dark. The locomotive seemed like a big lion that had just been going to spring at us.
"Hurrah!" we heard the fellows down in the car calling.
"P-f-f-f-f-f-f," the locomotive went.
"Let _me_ do it! Let _me_ do it!" Pee-wee yelled.
I took the piece of gla.s.s out and leaned back against the tank. All of a sudden I saw something else sprawled all over the sheet. It was the right way around, too, for the engineer. I guess Pee-wee had been carrying it in his pocket. Anyway, there were spots on it where the soot had been wiped off. But it was easy to read it, and this is what it said:
MUCH OBLIGED, MISTER
Honest, can you beat that kid?
CHAPTER XXVIII
"SEEN IN THE MOVIES"
I guess the fellows down in the car must have seen the notice where it was printed kind of faint like, against a hill, because they couldn"t have seen it on the screen. Anyway, they set up a howl and began shouting up out of the windows. They"re a crazy bunch.
"Show them Pee-wee peeling potatoes! Show them Pee-wee flopping flip-flops!" they began yelling.
"Show them the one of me stirring soup," the kid said, grabbing me by the arm; "that"s the best one!"
I said, "You crazy Indian, do you think those people in the flyer are there to see a movie show? Keep still, here come a couple of men with lanterns."
"They"re going to penetrate the mystery," Pee-wee said. I guess he got that out of some book, hey? _Penetrate the mystery._
I said, "As long as they didn"t penetrate this car, I"m satisfied."
We could see two lights bobbing along toward us from the train. Even with lanterns it must have been a pretty risky job, walking those ties.
All the while Pee-wee and I were taking down the sheet, and as soon as we loosened it from the sticks, the fellows down in the car pulled them in.
"Look how clear it shows against the hill, now the sheet isn"t up," I said to Pee-wee.
I guess you know what I meant, all right. Even through the sheet the printing had shown kind of dim against a hill in back of the train, but with the sheet taken down it showed pretty clear and it seemed awful funny. And besides, now that the sheet was down we had a good look at the train; the light from the movie apparatus seemed to shine right along the tops of the cars.
All of a sudden, Pee-wee grabbed me by the arm and said, "Look! _Look!_ On the top of the second car. Look! Do you see? Right beside that long sort of a boiler thing."
I looked, and then, for once, I had sense enough to do the right thing in a hurry. I closed the shutter in the apparatus.
"Did you see them?" Pee-wee whispered, all excited.
"Sure," I said; "two men."
They were lying on the top of the car, right close against a big, long thing like a boiler. It was much bigger than the thing on our car. One was lying on one side of it, and the other one on the opposite side. The reason I shut the light off in such a hurry was because I didn"t want them to know they were seen.
"Are they train robbers?" Pee-wee whispered to me. "Are they highwaymen?"
"They"re high enough to be highwaymen," I told him.
"Maybe they"re bandits, hey?" he said.
"I hope so, for your sake," I told him. "I hope they"re a couple of pirates, but I guess they"re only tramps. Come on, let"s go down."
We dangled the movie apparatus down and the fellows took it in through the window. Then they came out on the platform and helped the kid and me down. That was a pretty hard job, believe _me_. Just as we got our feet on terra what d"ye call it.--I mean terra cotta[A]--that Latin for platform--anyway, you know what I mean--as soon as we got our two feet (I mean four feet) on the platform, the two men with lanterns had just reached it.
One of the men said, "What"s all this? What are you doing here, anyway?
Who are you?" Gee whiz, it sounded like an examination paper.
Whenever we get mixed up with grown-up people it"s usually me--I mean _I_--that has to do the talking. Pee-wee usually helps though. So I gave the men our regular motto.
I said, "We"re here because we"re here. Ask me something easy. This is the Comedy of Errors." I said that because we have the Comedy of Errors in school and I just happened to think of it.
I guess the man was the fireman; anyway, he had on a jumper. He walked into the car and looked all around with his lantern and the other man looked all around, too, trying to size us up, I guess.
The fireman said, "Comedy of Errors, huh?"
Pee-wee said, "Sure, that"s in Shakespeare."
"Well, it"s mighty gol darn lucky you had a movie machine along," the fireman said. "You youngsters have had a _mighty narrow_ escape."