“Why hoof it,” I laughed, “when we have a perfectly good automobile to ride in?”
The other didn’t need an encyclopedia to get that.
“What!” he squeaked. “Start out in Ivory Dome’s old junk-pile? You’re crazy.”
“It’ll be fun.”
“But it’s all smashed up.”
“I have a hunch,” I hung on, still grinning, “that we can make it run.”
“Hot dog!” then came from Poppy, who knows real fun when he sees it, and away he scooted for the road.
So far as we could see, the old junk-pile hadn’t been made any junkier by its tip-up. Putting the straight four back on its wabbly legs, we twisted the engine’s tail and away it went—the engine, I mean, and not its tail—as sweet and pretty as seventeen rusty windmills trying to out-skip each other in a hundred-mile gale. It was a perfectly gorgeous racket. The envy that would shine in the other kids’ green eyes, I thought, all swelled up with pride, when they saw us—and heard us!—on the road! Oh, baby! We had the world by the tail.
Handy around machinery, including wheelbarrows and bicycle pumps, Poppy soon got the hang of things. And I let old greasy nose fiddle this and twiddle that to his heart’s content. He was tuning it up, he said—only he didn’t say it, he yelled it.
Here old Ivory Dome percolated into the landscape.