There were a lot of ladies around our auto, and gee, but that old Cadillac looked big on account of the inventor looking so little. He sat in the middle of the back seat with my mother. Everybody was crazy about him. That’s the way it is with girls—they’re crazy about people who have had adventures.
I said to Westy, “The inventor started as a poor boy under Tony’s Lunch Wagon, and now look, he has the world at his feet. They go crazy about bandits.”
“Look,” Westy whispered to me.
I was just going to step into the car when I looked where he pointed, and there, standing all by himself, quite a ways off, was Charlie Slausen. He looked as if maybe he was waiting to speak to us, only didn’t dare to come up where all the people were.
“Go ahead,” I said to our chauffeur; “we’ll walk up. You’ve got a heavy enough load with the inventor.”
After the car had started off we went over to where Charlie was standing. He looked awful funny, his eyes kind of, I don’t know——
I said, “Well, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. We didn’t get you in dutch, did we? Didn’t I tell you to leave it to us?”
He just began patting me on the shoulder and he kind of put his other arm around Westy’s shoulder.
“We were lucky they didn’t ask us anything more,” Westy said.
I said, “We’re always lucky, we are. We were born on the seventh day of the seventh month, and we always eat seven helpings of dessert.”