“About forty-eight hours and three months,” I said. “If you’ll give Westy a chance to speak, maybe he’ll give us an idea.”
We were all walking back up to town after our inspection of the old sunken tracks, and I could see that Westy was kind of silent; I mean I could hear that he was silent; I mean—you know what I mean—I should worry. Maybe you can’t hear a fellow being silent. You can never hear Pee-wee being silent, that’s one sure thing.
Westy was frowning just as if it was the end of vacation, and I knew he was thinking some thinks.
Pretty soon he said, “The two hardest things are getting the car past Tony’s Lunch Wagon and past Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop. After that it will be clear sailing—I mean rolling. I say let’s have a big scout rally in Downing’s lot. Let’s have games and races and everything, and ask all the scout troops for miles and miles around, and everybody’ll have to be good and hungry.”
“That’s easy!” Pee-wee shouted.
“Sure,” Connie Bennett piped up. “We’ll have the East Bridgeboro Troop over because there’s a fat scout in that troop.”
“I know the one you mean,” Hunt Ward said. “He’s shaped like a ferry boat.”
I said, “Sure, and here’s our own dear Pee-wee; he’s a whole famine in himself. He wouldn’t dare to look Hoover in the face.”
“But what’s the idea?” Dorry wanted to know.
“You started an argument and you haven’t got any premises.”