“There, now you see!” Pee-wee said. “You admit—”
“Just a minute, Scout. We decide that we want to go away. That is the only place we have in mind. We next go down to the railroad station in Hydome. In the ticket office is a ticket agent. Behind the ticket agent are a lot of pigeon-holes all full of tickets. I was born on the sixth of the month and Ray here was born on the seventh. That makes thirteen, an unlucky number—”
“I was born the day before the Fourth of July,” Pee-wee vociferated.
“So we count six pigeon-holes to the right and then seven pigeon-holes down,” Fuller continued. “Then we say to the ticket agent, ‘Sir, we would like two tickets out of that pigeon-hole.’ The idea is not original, it was derived from the grab-bag. Then follows an altercation with the ticket agent, but in the end we triumph.”
“Like me, I always triumph,” said Pee-wee.
“We then look at our tickets to see where we are going. Sometimes we count three across and ten down so as to change our destination. Only the numbers must make thirteen or else we won’t have any bad luck. Last summer we went to a little village in— Where was it, Ray?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Ray.
“Well, it was somewhere,” said Fuller; “we found that out later. When we got out at the station we started up the road and stopped at the third house we came to—we always do that. But this summer we took the Drerie’s summer resort book after we had discovered that we were going to Snailback Impoliteness or whatever you call it and we turned to Snailback and went over the ads. counting eenie, meenie, minee, mo, and mo landed us at the Snailback House.
“So here we are, on our way to Good-for-nothing farm. Everything happens as it should, only different. Summer before last we got off at—oh, what was the name of that place in Wisconsin where we tried to follow the shore of a lake because somebody said that when you’re lost it’s always best to follow water? We came out just where we started. There was good fishing there. I don’t know whether the lake had any name or not.”
“You’re supposed to follow the streams,” Pee-wee said contemptuously.