From the adventure just narrated you might suppose Emerson Skybrow rather than Pee-wee to be the hero of this faithful chronicle. Such, however, is not the case. Emerson was in truth a hero, but he was Pee-wee’s property by right of discovery.
“Didn’t I invent him?” Pee-wee demanded in a thunderous voice of challenge.
Poor Emerson was in for it now and the next night he went up to Pee-wee’s house to take his first lesson in scouting and to listen to Pee-wee’s radio.
Since the unhappy episode of the Queen Tut costume, Pee-wee and his sister had not been on cordial terms; indeed the relation was so strained that our hero contemplated the prospect of having a boy come to see him not without some trepidation. He selected the following night (which was Wednesday) because he knew that Elsie in a hastily devised Joan of Arc costume would be absent at the masquerade. Queen Tut had died a sudden death and in her place “The Maid of Orleans” had appeared as a sort of understudy.
Since Pee-wee’s brief illness a reform movement had been instituted in his home looking to the avoidance of any more holidays from school. A feature of this brutal program was the closing of the pantry against late raids. “This continual eating, especially at night, has got to stop,” Doctor Harris had said.
Pee-wee knew that neither of his parents would enforce this rule and that it would presently become a dead letter. But he feared that Elsie, capable of any atrocity now, would spy on him and shame her indulgent parents into making good their resolution. Pee-wee could “handle” his mother and father, but he could not in that critical time “handle” his infuriated sister. If she heard him go downstairs at the significant hour of ten or eleven she would balk his project, appealing to the powers higher up, out of pure spitefulness.
All this was easily to be avoided by inviting the new hero on the evening of the great masquerade, and thereby other adventures ensued confirming Pee-wee’s right to the title of “fixer.” Queen Tut was dead but the dreadful radio still lived.
“I’m sure I should be very glad to listen in,” said Emerson politely, “and it’s very good of you to ask me.”
Emerson was the kind of boy who voluntarily wiped his feet before entering a house, but even this defect could not dim his glory now; he might be a little gentleman, but he was still a hero.
“I guess every one in town has gone to the masquerade to-night,” he observed, pausing in his encounter with the doormat. “Shall I hang my hat here?” he added, as he stepped in.