The visitors thought of a great many other gibes before they finally dispersed, leaving Tom and Willard in sole possession of the front steps. Long after he was out of sight under the trees that lined the street they could hear Jimmy Lippit imitating the wheezy horn on which he had performed so busily. The two boys said nothing for a space. Then Willard broke the silence. “Well, we got it, Tom,” he said. Tom nodded. “It――it didn’t look quite so bunged-up when it was in Saunders’, did it?” “No.” Willard pulled a twig from the honeysuckle vine and sniffed it thoughtfully. “I say, Tom.” “Yep?” “We――we’re putting an awful lot of money into this. Suppose we didn’t make it go!” “But Brennan says it’ll go――――” “I mean suppose the scheme didn’t go, Tom. Think of the money we’d lose!” “I know.” Tom nodded. “I don’t like to think of it, Will. We――we’ve just got to make it go! That’s all there is to it! We’ve just _got_ to, Will!” CHAPTER VI WILLARD GOES ON STRIKE “I’m afraid,” observed Willard, laying his brush down and straightening some of the kinks from his back, “that there’ll be more gnats and flies on here than paint. Wonder how it would do to rig a mosquito netting over us, Tom.” “They are pretty bad, and that’s a fact,” agreed Tom without ceasing the slap-slap of his brush. “I’ve picked off a couple of hundred this morning, I guess.” They were in the stable loft, with the swinging doors wide open and the little back yard and garden spread beneath them in the hot sunshine of a mid-June day. It was Saturday morning and they were courageously applying the second coat of gray paint to the automobile body. Jimmy Brennan had suggested that it would be a simple matter to hoist the body up into the loft by block and tackle and that up there it would be both out of his way and where the boys could work on it to their hearts’ content. They had had a harder job than anticipated, for the old finish on the car, while stained and rubbed, cracked and flaked, was as hard as baked enamel when it came to removing it; and they had been assured that it would be necessary to remove it before applying new paint. They had worked most of four afternoons with patent paint removers and sand paper before the task had been accomplished. Even then the corners and under surfaces hardly bore critical examination. But the new paint seemed to take very well and the first coat, while a bit thin and streaky in places, had worked a wonderful change in the appearance of the body. The second coat was going on now, and after that had dried there would be two coats of varnish.