Pretty soon we came to the Post Office. There were a lot of people standing around the Post Office and they were talking about the railroad strike. I knew that if we once got past the Post Office we’d be all right. Because post offices in the country are where sheriffs and constables and other people that haven’t got anything to do hang out. It wasn’t much of a post office. I guess they called it a post office because there was a post out in front of it. There was one of those signs tacked to that post. I said to Pee-wee, “This is a young reviewing stand. Look straight ahead, keep your mouth shut, and look kind of careless—you know—carefree.” _Good night_, you should have seen the look he put on! “Is that what you call care free?” I whispered to him. “You look like an advertisement for tooth powder.” “That’s the scout smile,” he whispered. Honest, you’d have laughed to see him; he was looking straight ahead and grinning all over his face. “Look natural,” I whispered to him. “Look as if there wasn’t a convict in the van. Look as if you never saw a convict.” “How can any fellow look as if he never saw a convict?” he whispered. “Most everybody has never seen a convict.” “Well, look like them, then,” I told him. “Look the same as a person would look if he wasn’t helping a convict to escape.” He put on another kind of a smile and then he whispered to me, “I bet now those people will say I’m not helping a convict to escape, hey?” “Sure,” I told him; “you look as if you were on the track of an ice cream soda. Keep still and the worst will soon be over.” XXIII—FIXING IT As we went past the Post Office I felt pretty shaky, because there were a whole lot of people there and some of them were women, and there were a lot of children, too. The women said, “Isn’t he cute?” They meant Pee-wee. Everybody stared at us as we went by, and read the printing on the van and said how the boy scouts were all right. It didn’t seem as if anybody was suspicious at all. Some of them waved to us and we waved back and I heard a man say that we were lively youngsters. Gee whiz, nobody ever accused us of being dead, that’s one sure thing. One lady said how she had seen Pee-wee in the store and how he had told her all about good turns. She said it must be great to be a boy. Gee whiz, she said something that time. “Now you see,” Pee-wee whispered; “it’s good I was in that store. It’s good I told them all about the scouts, because now they’re not suspicious. They think it’s all right for kids to be doing this, because I told them scouts are resourceful.” “Did you tell them how we have plenty of initials?” I asked him. “Do you know what safe conduct is?” he asked me. “I know that yours isn’t always safe,” I told him.