I said, “If you don’t keep still a minute, I’ll make a couple of motions and you’ll land under one of the seats. I want suggestions. If we can only manage to get this old car across Willow Place, the rest will be easy. It’s down hill all the way across the Sneezenbunker land right down to the marsh. If we get her as far as the marsh we’ll get her across all right.”
“The track down there wouldn’t hold a locomotive,” Westy said.
“We should worry about a locomotive,” I told him; “there are other ways. But how are we going to get her by Tony’s? And how about Slausen’s on Willow Place? Do you think they’re going to get out of the way if we toot a horn? Tony’s lunch wagon is all boarded up underneath, and you know what an ugly old grouch he is.”
“Maybe if we bought a lot of frankfurters from him,” our young hero said, “maybe then he’d—kind of—— That’s what you call diplomacy.”
“Diplomacy is what governments do,” Connie Bennett said. “Do you mean to say that England would do anything for the United States just because we bought a frankfurter for King George?”
“You’re crazy!” Pee-wee shot back at him. “Diplomacy is when you’re very nice and polite so as to get something you want.”
“Like two helpings of dessert,” I told him.
“But anyway, I know something better than diplomacy,” he shouted; “and that’s strategy.”
I said, “All right, as long as everybody’s shouting at once and we’re not getting anywhere, let’s go over to Tony’s and if we can’t dip him maybe we can strat him.”
So that’s the way it was, the first thing we did to get that car moved was to go over to Tony’s and each buy a frankfurter. There were twenty-four of us in there at once. Twenty-four frankfurters are a good many for one fellow—I don’t mean for one fellow to eat, but for one fellow to sell.