“Listen,” shouted Pee-wee, “I’ve got an inspiration. It’s a dandy idea. All we need is ten cents and a big boarding-house!”
“Do you make gasoline by mixing those together?” Townsend asked. “Take one large boarding-house, stir thoroughly, and add ten—”
“You’re crazy—listen! There are lots of women at boarding-houses, aren’t there? They’ve all got scissors and things to be sharpened. Last year when I was at Snailsdale Manor Farm a man came around sharpening knives and scissors and things, ten cents each. He made a lot of money. Listen, Townsend, you stop laughing and listen—wait till I finish eating this rice cake and I’ll tell you—you—you—maybe even we don’t need ten cents. Have you got any emery cloth—for spark-plugs and things?”
“I guess I could scare up a couple of sheets.”
“Then all we have to do—listen—all we have to do is—have you got rims that come off? Sure you have. All we have to do is jack up the back wheels and take the tire and the rim off one of them and tack emery cloth all the way round; it’ll last to sharpen about twenty pairs of scissors and things. Gee whiz, it’s better to have resources than go asking favors, isn’t it? We’ll make a great hit, you see! You be the one to sharpen the things and I’ll be the one to shout, hey?”
The proposal to turn one of the rear wheels of his flivver into a grindstone at first struck Townsend as preposterous but on reflecting he saw no reason why this could not be done. Emery cloth, tacked on the edge of a wheel would not last long, but it would last a little while, and if business was good they could probably get some more emery cloth at the village where the big boarding-house was. The element of comedy which their outlandish device would have would in itself be something of a drawing card. The world likes to see people (especially boys) original and industrious. It always pays its tribute to ingenuity.
“It’ll be a kind of a show, too,” Pee-wee said.
And, indeed, so it proved. Pee-wee knew his public. He had enlivened the tedium of summer boarding-houses before, but this proved his master stroke. It was “just what they wanted,” to quote the advertisements.
Early in the morning they set forth, the gasoline so low in the tank that Townsend, wriggle and jounce as he would, could not arouse an answering splash from the depths below him. “There’s just about enough to take a grease spot out with,” he said cheerily. In the promising sunshine of Pee-wee’s presence he seemed to have regained his wonted spirit.
“You leave them to me,” Pee-wee said; “you let me do the talking, see?” Townsend agreed to this since there was no way of preventing it. “Right after breakfast they always come out on the porch and sew and do things like that; some of them take constitutions but most of them sew. That’s the time to catch them.”