“I’ll tell the world it’s hard work,” Red piped up from the back of the car, where he was stretched full length on the seat.
“Well,” grinned Dad, “anything worth having is worth working for.” After which little sermon he inquired how the show business was coming along, asking particularly if we had received any congratulatory professional telegrams from P. T. Barnum or Al Ringling.
We would soon open up for business, I told him, paying no attention to his nonsense about the [[38]]telegrams. Our big job now, I explained, was to get the engine to working and rig up some kind of a propeller.
“I suppose you’re incorporated,” he said, further joshing me.
“Ask Scoop,” I grinned. “He’s the manager.”
“Well, I hope that he proves to be a better manager than he did the night that he had the fire department squirting water on the Meyers’ barn.”
“Scoop’s all right,” I waggled.
That afternoon the thermometer went up to something like one hundred degrees in the shade, only we didn’t know much about what it was like in the shade for the junk that we were working on was piled in the middle of the yard where there were no trees. We lugged castings and steel bars and other stuff around until it seemed to me as though the muscles of my arms would crack and curl up. I never was so dog-gone tired in all my life. But we made progress. The pile of stuff in the middle of the yard began to look more orderly. We put the cast iron in one pile and the steel pieces in another pile. The brass stuff went into a box. Mr. Solbeam explained to us that the brass was worth more than the iron and steel, and at his orders we dragged the box to a [[39]]shed, the door of which was fitted with a padlock.
The shed, we found, was cluttered with all kinds of odd and interesting things that the junk man had bought, in the probable thought that he would be able to resell the stuff and make a profit.
“What the dickens?…” yipped Scoop. “Here’s some pieces of a merry-go-round. Look at the wooden horses! Some with three legs and some with two legs and some with only one leg. Here’s one without a head.”