“If only we had known in starting out,” groaned Poppy, “that C. H. O. was open. We could have been in Pardyville by now.”
“Yes,” says I, of a sort of financial turn of mind, “and we would have twenty dollars in our jeans instead of eighteen.”
That stirred up the other one to more unhappy thoughts.
“Good night!” he yipped, yanking the steering wheel just in time to keep our Rolls-Royce from kicking over a tree. “Do you suppose we’ll have to cough up another two bucks to get through that crazy town?”
“I don’t see how we’re going to escape it,” says I, “unless our gallant little gas chewer grows a pair of wings.”
“The blamed robbers! It’s a skin-game, Jerry.”
“Nothing else but.”
“Still, I don’t blame old Goliath so much. He’s got to do what the others tell him, I suppose.”
“He tried to skin us on his own hook,” I reminded, a bit stiff in my feelings toward the tricky old geezer.
“He didn’t get by with it, so why hold it against him?”