He cranked his flivver and it gave Pee-wee a feeling of isolation and homesickness to hear the old engine chugging away and the car shaking and quaking in every bone and joint like a victim of palsy.
“Ride on ahead,” said Inspector Snagg as he and his companion stepped into the official car. “Some nerve, huh?” Pee-wee heard one of them say.
The flivver with its lone driver looked funny as it rattled along the road with the trim roadster behind it. Pee-wee had never had this view of it before. Being without a top or a back it had a queer look, unlike other cars. It seemed like some hapless hoodlum being taken in for throwing stones. Poor, friendly, faithful, dilapidated, ramshackle little flivver! It made Pee-wee despise all Buicks to see that official car, so smug and trim, following after.
The Ford, being topless and backless, Townsend’s form was conspicuous, sitting upright on the front seat as the little cavalcade receded. Pee-wee felt as if the Ford, like Keekie Joe of Barrel Alley, was a member of his patrol. He realized now, as he had not realized before, what a joyous institution was formed by Townsend and his flivver.
The twilight was again spreading its dusky coverlet over the country and Pee-wee felt very strange and lonesome.
CHAPTER XVIII
PEE-WEE DOESN’T WATCH HIS STEP
The sun, which had not been out many hours on that memorable day, withdrew behind the hills, the Italian woman withdrew within her domicile, the billy goat withdrew to his private suite and was soon wrapped in slumber. And night cast its shroud over the quiet countryside.
Pee-wee felt strange and very lonesome. There he was, almost exactly half-way between Bridgeboro and Temple Camp marooned in a railroad tower house. To be sure, his situation was not desperate; occasionally an auto passed along the road, the Italian woman (though apparently not deeply interested in his adventures) was somewhere within call, and, in any case, Townsend would either return or send some one. What Pee-wee could not comprehend was that a perfectly innocent person could be subjected to the indignity of arrest. Townsend had not been able to show his card, therefore he had been taken away. The reason had nothing to do with it. Pee-wee may have heard that the law is blind, but he had never known that it is deaf, dumb and blind.
There was nothing to do now but wait, so he sat on the low shelf which had evidently been a sort of desk, dangling his legs. At first he looked at the pictures in the seven-year-old magazine, but somehow he could not fix his mind on the pictures and he threw the torn, yellow-leaved periodical from him.