Automobile travel -- Juvenile fiction; Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction
So we decided that we wouldn’t depend on anybody but would act just the
same as if we were on a desert island where there weren’t any barbers
and bathtubs and things, because Columbus and Daniel Boone didn’t have
barbers and bathtubs and things.
“They depended upon their own initials,” Pee-wee said.
“You mean initiative,” I told him.
He said, “What’s the difference?”
So then I ran the machine over to the side of the road right close to a
kind of a grove and we got some gas out of the tank and Brent and I went
inside the van. We told Pee-wee to stay outside so as to keep people
from opening the doors or fooling with the car, because we were in the
village and we thought maybe people would be hanging around.
There was only one thing to do with Brent’s hair, and that was to cut it
off, because the tar was so thick there that the gasoline wouldn’t melt
it. I made a pretty good job of it with the little folding scissors in
Pee-wee’s scout knife. We managed to get most of the tar off his face
with the gasoline, but it left his face kind of all black and sooty
looking.
He couldn’t sit down or lean against anything on account of the tar all
over his clothes, so he took them off and I handed them out to Pee-wee
and told him to throw them in the grove. Then Brent put on the convict’s
suit, and he looked awful funny in it with his dirty face and his hair
all cut short.
He said, “At last the dream of my young life has come true; I am a
criminal. The only thing is I haven’t committed my crime yet.”
I said, “Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry about that.”
He said, “But it seems sort of _false_ for me to be wearing a convict’s
suit when I haven’t committed any crime. It seems like deceiving people.
It troubles my conscience. And I haven’t really escaped either. What
would you do if you were me? I don’t want to disgrace the uniform I
wear. I wish I could think of some nice easy crime. I feel nice and
clean in these things, anyway. But my conscience is black. Do you
suppose there’s a bank in this burg, and a jail? I was thinking if I
could just let myself down by a rope. Only it would be just my luck to
have a cell on the ground floor.”
I said, “The best cell for you is right in this little old van, at least
till we get out of town. You leave the rope business to Douglas
Fairbanks. If anybody in this place should see you, _good night_, Sister
Anne! And it isn’t any joke, either. Now you’ve got your wish, you’ll
see it isn’t going to be as much fun as you thought it was.”
Brent sat down on an old grocery box that we had inside the van, and,
jiminetty, I had to laugh, he had such a funny way about him. He looked
awful tough, sort of, without his hair. He said, “Well, I appoint you my
keeper. I hope I’m not such a cheap sort of a criminal as to try to
escape from a delivery van. A stone dungeon or nothing for me.” Gee
whiz, that fellow’s particular.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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