“You had quite a time of it, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” said Pee-wee, with more truth than the principal suspected.
“Walter, I suppose you know of the plan we’ve adopted here of having selected pupils act as traffic officers during the rush hours, as I might call them, when the boys and girls are coming and going in the neighborhood of the school building.”
“Yes, sir,” said Pee-wee, hoisting up one of his stockings.
“The idea is to safeguard the pupils, especially the smaller ones, from careless drivers. The boys appointed to take this responsibility are of course pupils in good standing—intelligent, keen-witted, resourceful. They wear badges and have the cooperation and backing of the police.”
“They have whistles, don’t they?” Pee-wee asked.
Already he saw himself, or rather heard himself, blowing his lungs out in autocratic warning for the traffic to pause. His roving eye caught sight of something on Doctor Sharpe’s desk which gladdened his heart. This was a huge, celluloid disk or button as large as a molasses cookie and equipped with a canvas band to encircle the arm and hold it in place. If it had indeed been a molasses cookie, Pee-wee could hardly have contemplated it with deeper yearning.
“I was an official in the clean-up campaign,” Pee-wee said. “I made ’em clean up Barrel Alley. I cooperated with the police, I did. Once I even got a man arrested for throwing a pie in the street. Gee whiz, that isn’t what pies are for.”
“I should say not,” smiled Doctor Sharpe.
“So I know all about being a public official, kind of,” said Pee-wee.