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Updated: June 8, 2025
His friends were sleeping soundly. He withdrew from the tent and looked about again. The island was about a mile farther downstream than where it had been moored. Looking down the river, Keekie Joe could see the boat-house, and the gilt ball on top of the flagpole shone dazzling in the early sunlight. The shores and river seemed fresh and new and clean, bathed in the growing light of the new day.
There seemed nothing left now but to break off diplomatic relations altogether. The issue was clear. But Keekie Joe did not plunge his outlandish person into war. "If I didn' have ter lay keekie I'd slam yer one," he announced. "What's the use of giving you candy if we can't be friends?" Pee-wee said. "Gee whiz, I wouldn't care how much candy fellers threw at me; the more the merrier.
In the water, Keekie Joe was at his best. He swam to shore like a little devil. Then, with all his might and main, he ran northward through the woods keeping close to the shore. This necessitated his swimming through mud and marshy places. But he hurried on, soaked, weary, panting.
"I'll show you how to catch if you'll say you'll be a scout," Pee-wee answered. There could be no better illustration of his desperation as a scout missionary than this artless proposition to the sentinel of Barrel Alley. "Who can't catch?" Keekie Joe demanded. "You can't." "Me?" "Yes, you." "Yer dasn' say it again." "You can't catch, you can't catch, you can't catch," said Pee-wee.
He had not pictured them as travelling on their private islands surrounded by mammoth icing cakes five stories high, and towers of chocolate. He had not fancied them sitting on ice cream freezers and tossing the emptied receptacles from them. Pee-wee had told his friend of the morning that they would both vote for Keekie Joe and that Keekie Joe should be the patrol leader.
It happened, as the time of the summer occasion was drawing near, that it behoved us to make arrangements about the assistance; and upon the suggestion of the elders, to which I paid always the greatest deference, I invited Mr Keekie of Loupinton, who was a sound preacher, and a great expounder of the kittle parts of the Old Testament, being a man well versed in the Hebrew and etymologies, for which he was much reverenced by the old people that delighted to search the Scriptures.
Then around the distant corner appeared two figures in civilian clothes, strangers in Barrel Alley. They were County Detectives Slippett and Spotson. They strolled down the alley innocently. Keekie Joe, whose activities were chiefly local, knew them not. But Pee-wee Harris, Scout, knew them. On one of his long hikes he had seen them arrest a motorist in Northvale.
He picked up the fragments and ate them, and there before him stood the strange, small boy, who threw a sponge cake directly at his head and hit him with it plunk. "Wotcher chuckin' dem at me fer?" Keekie Joe demanded menacingly.
This was not true, for indeed Keekie Joe did not sleep in a bed at all; he slept on a heap of old inner tubes in Ike Levine's tire repair shop. He was about to resent this slander from Pee-wee with a glowering look and a threat, when suddenly something happened, which precipitately terminated his performance of his official functions.
You go ahead over and I'll keep watch and if I don't do it you can punch me in the eye the next time you see me." It was not so much this proffer of indemnity as a supplementary threat from the window across the way which decided Keekie Joe. He did not believe in Pee-wee for he did not believe in anybody. But he was a bit puzzled at this self-possessed little stranger from another world.
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