“Guess I can rig you up somethin’,” said the man. “Are you in any hurry?”
“Tell him no,” Pee-wee whispered. He was by now so thoroughly in the spirit of travelling that he began to dread reaching their destination. He wanted to extend their journey, or the time of it, and be alone with Townsend for another whole day. With all his ingenuity he had not thought of any way of fixing this. But now the companionable flivver seemed disposed to fix it for him.
From their last camping place they had averaged about three miles an hour. It was altogether characteristic of Pee-wee that he had forgotten all about his famous relay race and his unknown pal. Townsend was his pal and he was having the time of his life and that was enough for him.
CHAPTER XXIX
“RESOURCES”
The garage man said he would put a new fan belt on as soon as he finished work on another car. That, he said, would be about five o’clock. The belt would cost seventy cents and the labor of adapting it to the Ford would be fifty cents. They make you flat prices in the country and do things cheap.
Out of the two dollars and sixty cents which the travellers had earned they had spent a dollar and thirty-five cents for five gallons of gas. This left them a dollar and twenty-five cents. The repair would cost them one dollar and twenty cents which would leave them just exactly one nickel. They would be in no predicament, however, since they had gas enough to carry them to camp and food enough to carry them to the North Pole. Their poverty was on the goat’s conscience, if he had any.
Before leaving the garage they selected a light lunch out of their inexhaustible store, in procuring which Pee-wee strewed the floor and seat of the car with packages and canned goods.
“Never mind them now, we’ll pick them up later,” he said, as he selected a couple of bananas, a package with a few cookies in it, and several cakes of chocolate. “We won’t bother to cook any lunch, hey, because we’ll take a hike?”
“Yes, and cook when we get back.”