Pee-wee was just about to make a frantic rush to the house when he saw another automobile coming along the road, brushing the projecting foliage aside as some stealthily advancing creature might do. Not far behind it he could hear other cars grinding along that impossible road in second gear.
The world seemed to be making a pathway, or rather a highway, to Pee-wee’s door. The sequestered, overgrown road, with its intertwined and overarching boughs, was become a surging thoroughfare. The birds, formally unmolested in their wonted haunts, complained to one another of this sudden intrusion into their domains.
Away back where this obscure road branched off the highway to furnish the unfrequented access to Everdoze and Berryville, a sign had been placed that morning with an arrow pointing toward the depths of the Everdoze jungle.
DETOUR ⇾
HIGHWAY CLOSED. FOLLOW
YELLOW ARROWS.
These yellow arrows appeared at intervals along the Everdoze road, thus guiding the motorist back to the highway at a point a mile or two below the gap where the bridge had been. Everdoze was on the map now in dead earnest. The little hamlet nestling in its wooded valley was destined to review such a procession of Pierce-Arrows, and Packards, and Cadillacs, aye and Fords and jitney busses, as it had never dreamed of in all its humble career.
Who was responsible for this? Or was accident responsible? Who, if anyone, by the mere touching of a match had started a blaze which would illuminate poor little Everdoze? Everdoze had gone to bed (at eight P. M.) in obscurity. It had awakened to find itself dragged into the light of day. Already Constable Bungel was devising a formidable code of “traffic regulations”—traps and snares to catch the prosperous and make them pay tribute as they passed along.
As early as seven o’clock that vigilant agent of the peace had placed a sign in front of the post office (where he was wont to loiter) reading, “NO PARKING HERE.” But all the while he hoped that the unwary would park there and pay the three dollars and costs.
But of all the signs which appeared in Everdoze on that day when fate, like an alarm clock, had awakened it out of its slumber, there was one which thrilled the soul of Pee-wee Harris and caused consternation to everybody else. This appeared in front of the “Taown Hall” and at a number of other strategic places in and out of the village.