LABOR TROUBLES
Skiddyunk was a nice town only, one thing, there were industrial disturbances there. Maybe you know what those are, hey? The boy that delivered the newspapers was on a strike. He was on a sympathy strike, that's what the man in the candy store told us. He was on a sympathy strike on account of the steel strikers. He read in a book that car wheels are made out of compressed paper sometimes, and as long as some of them were made out of steel, too, he decided he wouldn't deliver the papers that Saturday, on account of the newspaper being printed on paper. Gee whiz, I don't see how a paper could be printed on anything else except paper. That paper only came out twice a week, because there wasn't much news in Skiddyunk.
As long as we only had forty-two cents we decided it was best to buy five ice-cream cones, because then we'd have only seventeen cents left and we couldn't send a telegram. Pee-wee said it was best not to have any temptation to send a telegram.
We asked the man in the candy store if he thought the people who lived in Skiddyunk would come to a movie show in Ridgeboro that night. He said they would if they knew about it, only he didn't see where we could have it there. So then we told him about our car.
He said, "Is it a movie theatre?"
"You said it," I told him; "it moves all over. Even the Strand Theatre in New York doesn't move so much. And anyway," I said, "are there any fish in that lake?"
He said if there were only as many people up there in Ridgeboro as there were fish in the lake that Ridgeboro would be as big as New York.
"Good night!" I said.
He said they just stood in a row up there waiting to be caught. He said nobody had to starve around that way, if he had a fish-hook.
I said, "I wouldn't eat a fish-hook no matter how hungry I was."