“I know, Kid, but I got a good calling down in court. I was told I’d better cut out the goat story and get back out of the state of New York before I get locked up. I’m not going to tell a string of lies all the way to camp, I’m not built that way. I’d rather be knocked down than be talked to the way that little hay-seed justice of the peace—” “If you’ll keep still a minute,” screamed Pee-wee, “I’ll tell you something to knock you down, _so there_. _Read that letter!_ Then see what you think—you’re so scared!” Stooping in front of one of the cross-eyed headlights, Townsend read the momentous document. “Where in goodness’ name did you get this?” he asked. “I got it on account of having resources,” Pee-wee shouted; “only you won’t give me a chance to tell you.” “Go ahead, Kid,” Townsend said, almost too astonished to speak. In the greatest excitement, Pee-wee told of all that had happened during his companion’s absence. He talked vociferously, continuously,—coming up occasionally for air. “So _now_ what do you say?” he concluded with an air of scathing accusation. “I say we find a good place to eat supper and then turn in for the night, Kid,” said Townsend; “I’m tired out. Then we can make a fresh start for Catskill in the morning. This has been a terrible day, we’ll count it out.” “_We will not_,” roared Pee-wee. “A day with a lot of dandy adventures like this? Gee whiz, I’ll count to-morrow out if you want to, but not to-day.” “Well, there’s one good thing left about to-day,” said Townsend. “What’s that?” “Supper.” “You said it,” said Pee-wee. CHAPTER XXV 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—”