“Don’t you know a kindly old gentleman when you see one?” Pee-wee fairly
screamed.
“Let’s see one,” Artie shouted.
And that’s the way it went on till Mr. Ellsworth came to Pee-wee’s
rescue like he always does. He said we should let Pee-wee have the
chair.
“Here’s a couple of chairs for him,” we shouted.
“He can have the table too, if he wants it,” I said; anything to keep
him quiet.
“I don’t want to be quiet,” Pee-wee screamed.
Good night, that was some meeting. Well, pretty soon Mr. Ellsworth got
us all throttled down and Pee-wee started to tell us about his visit to
the kindly old gentleman. It seemed that was one of the houses that
Pee-wee called at alone and the kindly old gentleman fell for him like
grown up people mostly do. I don’t know what it is but everybody seems
to like Pee-wee. You know just because you jolly a fellow, it’s not a
sign you don’t like him. Pee-wee is one bully little scout, I’ll say
that much.
“Do you want to hear about it?” he said.
“Proceed with your narrative,” I told him; “begin at the beginning, go
on till you come to the end, then stop.”
“Be sure to stop,” Westy said.
Well, then Pee-wee went on to tell us about the kindly old gentleman. He
lived in a big white house, he said, with grounds around it and a big
flag pole on the lawn, with a flag flying from it. He said that the old
gentleman didn’t talk very good English and he thought maybe he was a
German or French or something or other. He guessed maybe he was a
professor or something like that. Anyway, he took Pee-wee through his
library, picking out the books he didn’t want, till he had given him
about twenty or thirty. Then they tied them up in a brown cord and
Pee-wee took them out to the Fraud car.
Well that’s about all there was to it, and I guess nothing more would
have happened, if I hadn’t untied the cord and picked up the book that
lay on top. It was a book about German history, princes and all that
stuff, and I guess it wouldn’t interest soldiers much. Just as I was
running through it, I happened to notice a piece of paper between the
leaves, which I guess the old gentleman put there for a book-mark. As
soon as I picked it up and read it, I said, “Good night! Look at this,”
and I handed it to Mr. Ellsworth. It said something about getting
information to Hindenburg, and about how a certain German spy was in one
of the American camps in France.
Mr. Ellsworth read it through two or three times, and then said, “Boys,
this looks like a very serious matter. You said the old gentleman spoke
broken English, Walter?”
That’s the name he always called Pee-wee.
“Cracky,” I said, “Pee-wee’s kindly old gentleman is a German spy.”
“Sure he is,” said Westy Martin, “and he’s only flying the American flag
for a bluff, he’s a deep dyed villain.”
“He can’t be dyed very deep,” said Doc Carson, in that sober way of his;
“because we haven’t any German dyes to dye him with.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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