“I’ll be there by eight,” I told him. “You stop on your way and get him some breakfast from Tony’s.”
On the way up the hill to my house (we live up on Blakeley’s Hill, it’s dandy up there) I began to find out what people were thinking about the fire. Maybe you think just on account of the Silver Fox Patrol being so famous in the history of the world that Bridgeboro (that’s where I live) is a great big place. Believe me, it isn’t big enough to hold the Silver Fox Patrol. If Hoboken was about the size of an elephant, Bridgeboro would be about as big as Pee-wee. So that shows you. There are only two candy stores in Bridgeboro and one of them is no good. Bridgeboro is so slow and tired it has to be sitting down all the time; that’s why they call it the county seat.
So everybody knows all about everybody else in Bridgeboro. They’re good scouts, they’re observant. Harry Donnelle says it takes a song three years to get from New York to Bridgeboro, even if it’s fast music. Anyway we’ve got a dandy river in Bridgeboro only it doesn’t stay there, it just passes through. Gee, I don’t blame it.
Mr. Dallman, he was standing in front of his drug store (don’t ever buy a soda in there whatever you do), he said to me, “Well, you kids have got yourselves in trouble, haven’t you? What’s the matter? Young Slausen been using you?”
From that I saw that people were suspecting him and not us. Gee whiz, that’s the way it is when you have a bad name.
I said, “Westy Martin and I were the ones who had to go to the station. We’re the ones that are accused if anybody is.”
“Yes, but you kids never started that fire,” he said. “You’re just protecting somebody. They’ll have young Slausen behind the bars by this time to-morrow. He and Bert Waring are a good pair. I guess young Waring wanted to see his Buick burned up all right. Charlie’ll clear up a couple of hundred dollars or so on his little flivver. I hope he’ll pay me the three dollars he owes me when he gets his insurance. What were you kids doing in there, anyway?”
I said, “If I tell you will you promise not to tell anybody?”
“It’s none of my concern,” he said.
“Well, we were standing in there,” I said. “So now you know what we were doing in there.”