Pee-Wee Harris Adrift | Page 5

with commissary stores, but on general principles he said,
"Give us a hunk of candy, will yer?"
As luck would have it, this random shot, fired at every strange boy from the upper world, hit the mark, to his unspeakable astonishment. Pulling out of his pocket a licorice jaw-breaker of vast dimensions, Pee-wee sent it shooting in a bee-line at the face of the stranger.
Never before in all his checkered history had Keekie Joe ever received any edible of any character whatever in response to his menacing demands. He had always assumed that boys who were well dressed had fruit or candy in their pockets. He had sometimes required them to verify their denials by an exhibition of the interior of these receptacles. His invariable demand had become a habit with him. Therefore the little sugared black brick which now hit him in the eye came as an unprecedented surprise. For a moment he did not know whether to construe it as a propitiatory gift or a warlike missile.
"What's the matter with you, can't you catch?" Pee-wee demanded.
CHAPTER IV
KEEKIE JOE
It required but a few seconds for Keekie Joe to decide to run true to form. The situation was an unusual one, the missile was a delicious morsel, and was nothing more nor less than what he had demanded. But still it had been thrown at him and Keekie Joe elected to consider it as a shot fired by the enemy.
"Whatcher chuckin' things at me fer?" he demanded, descending from the fence and approaching Pee-wee with a terrible look of menace. He had been careful, however, to pick the jawbreaker up and put it in his mouth.
"Didn't you say you wanted one?" Pee-wee asked. "Didn't you just put it in your mouth?"
"Never you mind wot I done," said Keekie Joe. "D'yer think yer cin sass me?"
"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.
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. They can throw mince pies at me for all I care," he added. "If you want to be a scout I'll show you how and we can start a patrol maybe."
[Illustration: Keekie Joe interviews Pee-wee]
The word patrol seemed to suggest something ominous to Keekie Joe, for he glanced furtively up and down the alley, and then waved his hand reassuringly to the group in the middle of the field.
Pee-wee perceived now that the scene of the crap game had been selected with keen military wisdom, affording a safe avenue of precipitate retreat in any direction. Disaster could have resulted only from a surrounding host. Officer McMahon, the tyrant on this squalid beat, was large. But he was not large enough to surround the camp.
The crap-shooters of Barrel Alley had been surprised in every nook and corner of their neighborhood until they had hit upon the bold expedient of playing in an open lot, reposing their trust in a sentinel. It would not have been well for the sentinel to relax his vigilance.
"What I want ter join them scout kids fer?" Keekie Joe inquired. "Der yer call me a sissy?"
"Do you call the scouts sissies?" Pee-wee inquired angrily. "They have more fun than you do, that's one sure thing. If you don't want to join you don't have to but you don't have to get mad about it. Gee whiz, you're always mad, kind of. I guess you got up out of the wrong side of the bed, that's what I think."
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. His father called him from a tenement across the street, accompanying his summons with such dismal predictions of what would happen if he did not obey that the official sentinel had no choice but to desert his post.
"If I have ter come over there'n git yer," the father said, "I'll----"
Poor Joe glanced at his father in the window, then at the gamesters