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Updated: June 8, 2025
"Me mudder sez I dasn' go swimmin' widout she leaves me." It was strange how Keekie Joe, who had disregarded his poor mother's wishes on so many occasions, should present her now to his new friends. He did not have any of the things which they had, bicycles, tents, cooking sets, radio sets; but one thing he had as well as they, a mother. And so he used her as they used theirs.
And still the man in the moon winked down, and smiled his merry scout smile upon Scout Harris. On that night, in the back yard of Billy Gilson's tire repair shop, Keekie Joe, the sentinel of Barrel Alley, sat upon a pile of old Ford radiators, untangling a complicated mass of fishing-line. He was trying to follow a selected strand through the various fastnesses of the labyrinth.
On Sunday morning, Townsend rowed ashore with Keekie Joe and invaded the tenement in Barrel Alley. He took a brand new package of cigarettes to Mr. Keekie Joe, Senior, and Keekie Joe, Junior, was struck dumb with awe at the familiar and persuasive way in which Townsend talked to his parent.
He was not thinking of the "constituted authorities," he was not thinking of the crap-shooters either; his back was turned to them and his all seeing eye was fixed on the distant street corner. He was thinking of Keekie Joe and of how Keekie Joe had tried to obey one of the good scout laws by being faithful to a trust. And there you have Pee-wee Harris in a nut-shell . . .
Under its flaunting traffic sign many adventures occurred that summer, but the present narrative must be confined to the surprising events which befell during Easter vacation. Later, in the good old summer time, we shall visit the island again if we can find it. It was a fortunate thing for Keekie Joe that Townsend Ripley was chosen leader of the new patrol.
What Keekie Joe beheld caused him to rub his eyes and concentrate his gaze with more intensity than ever he had shown while at his official post. There, bumping against the shore, was somebody or other's grass-plot with a tree on it and a little tent. The frightened natives who had witnessed the arrival of Columbus could not have been more astonished than Keekie Joe.
There was a straightforward, clear look in the little scout's eyes which bespoke both friendliness and sincerity and Keekie Joe did not understand this. The emergency decided him to repose faith in the strange boy but it was not in him to do this graciously.
The noise of this falling meteor awoke Keekie Joe and he sat up, holding the two sides of his head, startled and dizzy from hunger. And shining through the doorway of the shack he saw a light. It was not the moonlight, but another light, and he crept, light-headed and fearful, toward the opening, ready to run in case it was a cop . . .
He dreamed that the licorice jaw-breaker which that strange boy had thrown at him was the size of a brick, and that as it fell upon the ground it broke into a thousand luscious fragments like the pane of plate-glass through which Keekie Joe had lately thrown a rock.
But the place was bare now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with dust. These and the mass of net upon the ground were all that Keekie Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks in the weather-beaten boards. And now again Keekie Joe had to make a choice. He was hungry, oh, so hungry.
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