XVI—BRENT’S AMBITION
It was some job picking our way down that mountain. We could see the road and the machines away down below us and the machines looked like toy autos. Brent and Harry and Pee-wee and I were together and Brent talked a lot of that nonsense like he always does. Pee-wee had the convict’s suit rolled up tight and tied with a couple of thin willow twigs. If you wet them they’re just as good as cord; you can even tie them in a knot. He carried the bundle on the end of his scout staff and he had his scout staff over his shoulder. He looked so important you’d think he had just captured the convict, too.
Brent said, “That’s what I call real adventure; escaping from a prison and beating it off to some lonesome mountain and being taken away in an airplane. That fellow has old Monte Cristo beaten twenty ways. Some convicts are lucky. I’d like to be that chap.” That’s just the way he talked.
Harry said, “You might forge a couple of checks if you happen to think of it sometime.”
Brent said in that funny way of his, “If I could only be sure of escaping and being carried off by an airplane. But it would be just my luck to—to——”
“Languish,” Pee-wee shouted; “that’s what they do in jails—languish.”
“And just serve out my term studying logic,” Brent said. “But if I thought there’d be a chance to escape, I think I’d—let’s see, I think I’d—what do you think of counterfeiting, Harry?”
“Burglary’s better,” Harry said.
“It’s the dream of my life to be a convict,” Brent kept up. “These little crimes don’t amount to anything; what I’d like to do is to hit the high spots, get sent up for life, and then escape in a boat or an airplane. Somebody could send me a file or a saw in a bunch of flowers. What do you say? This convict is having the time of his life. That’s the life—being a fugitive.”
Harry said, “Well, I hope you get your wish.”
Pee-wee said, “You’re crazy, that’s what I say.”
I said, “Gee whiz, there’s fun enough making a cross country trip in four autos and running into a stranded Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company with bloodhounds and everything, without being sent to jail.”
Brent said, “Well, I can’t help it; that’s the way I feel. I envy that convict. I long to languish in a dungeon cell and file away the bars in the dead of night and kill three keepers and escape in an airplane. That’s living.”
“Good night,” I said, “not for the three keepers.”
Harry said, “Well, all things come round to him that waits. My ambition is to be wrecked at sea. How about you, Roy?”
I said, “My ambition is to foil old Major Grumpy and make him fall for the scouts.”
“No pep to it,” Brent said; “a dark and dismal dungeon with rats poking around on the stone floor, that’s my speed.”
Cracky, that fellow’s awful funny.
“You’d never get any dessert,” Pee-wee shouted.
Brent said, “Who wants dessert when he can get a crust of bread and a mug of water?”
“I do,” the kid shouted. “I want two helpings.”
That was his ambition.