"Believe _me_" I told him, "Columbus never discovered anything like this. I could kind of read in that man's face, the one with the suspender----" "He didn't have the suspender on his face," Pee-wee shouted. "Take a demerit for that, and stay after school," I told him. "I could kind of read in that man's face, that there is going to be some fun in Ridgeboro." "A tempest in a teapot, hey?" Westy said. "You ought to apologize to the next teapot you meet," I shot back at him. "Teapots aren't so small." * * * * * Pretty soon we got around the bend and then we could see the Skiddyunk Station. It was a regular station with a platform and everything, all fancy kind of. "It makes the poor little Brewster's Centre Station look like a dollar and a quarter," Connie said. I said, "I haven't seen a dollar and a quarter for so long that I can't tell, but the Brewster's Centre Station has traveled; that's what counts." Before we got to the station we saw where tracks branched off from the tracks we were following, so we knew that all the trains that passed Skiddyunk didn't pass Ridgeboro. I guess they didn't bother with that place much. At the Skiddyunk Station we got a time table and found that only one train a day passed Ridgeboro. It didn't go much further than Ridgeboro. I guess it got sick, hey? It only went as far as Slopson. Then we asked the express agent about freight trains and he said that a freight train went along that branch line every three days. He said there wouldn't be another one going east till Tuesday morning. Oh, boy, weren't we glad! "I'll miss French and civil government," Westy said. Connie said he'd only miss history. "I'll lose English and geography," I said; "but I won't miss them. Come on up the main street and let's see if we can find an ice-cream store." CHAPTER VIII LABOR TROUBLES Skiddyunk was a nice town only, one thing, there were industrial disturbances there. Maybe you know what those are, hey? The boy that delivered the newspapers was on a strike. He was on a sympathy strike, that's what the man in the candy store told us. He was on a sympathy strike on account of the steel strikers. He read in a book that car wheels are made out of compressed paper sometimes, and as long as some of them were made out of steel, too, he decided he wouldn't deliver the papers that Saturday, on account of the newspaper being printed on paper. Gee whiz, I don't see how a paper could be printed on anything else except paper. That paper only came out twice a week, because there wasn't much news in Skiddyunk. As long as we only had forty-two cents we decided it was best to buy five ice-cream cones, because then we'd have only seventeen cents left and we couldn't send a telegram. Pee-wee said it was best not to have any temptation to send a telegram.