HE GOES TO CONQUER
They found a good camping place a little farther along, parked Lizzie at the side of the road, and ate their late supper with a relish. (Fried bacon, toast, marmalade, and rice cakes with exasperated milk on them, to use Pee-wee’s own word.)
Pee-wee said that he always liked supper after adventures, but that he also liked it before adventures. There was only one thing about supper that he did not like and that was that after he had eaten it he wasn’t hungry any more.
Inspired by the hot meal and the spirit of their little camp-fire, he enlarged on his adventure of the evening and listened to Townsend’s less harrowing narrative of his own arraignment for “driving a motor vehicle without a license” and so forth and so forth and so forth. He had been dismissed with a reprimand and told not to be caught again in the State of New York without his card.
“Don’t you care,” said Pee-wee, wrestling with a queer specimen of culinary architecture which might have been a club sandwich struck by a cyclone; “if they stop us now we won’t care, because we’ve got the letter and anyway I’ve got an idea, I just thought of it. If you could kind of be disguised as a grown-up person, sort of, with a regular coat on or something like that, probably they wouldn’t stop us unless we ran into another offensive drive—”
“Intensive,” said Townsend.
“So wouldn’t that be a good idea?”
“It would be a good idea, Kid, only I haven’t got any disguise. And we haven’t got any gasoline either, if anybody should ask you. I doubt if we can make the village I just came from; we’re up against it. It beats anything how it holds out. I’d start out to-night again only I’m afraid we’d get stuck in the road and I don’t want to get stuck in the road at night. There’s a gas station in a barn about a mile up the road; there’s a big boarding-house there, but I hate like the dickens to—”
“Scouts can’t ask favors,” Pee-wee shouted. They’re supposed to have resources and—”
“Well, my resources are just a dime at present,” said Townsend.