TAKING IT EASY
And he just sat there, swinging his legs and laughing. It was as good as a circus to see him.
"Go ahead, run," he said; "it won't do you any good. Sink this car in the lake if you want to. That'll just mean a longer time in jail. We should worry. You thought a boy scout didn't know how to hit back, didn't you? Let's see you start the machine. You're a couple of circus clowns, that's what you are. You ought to be a pair of villains in the movies. Head hurt much, Roy?"
"Not so bad now," I told him.
Gee whiz, those fellows didn't wait long. Before Westy was finished speaking they were off the car and headed into the woods. That was the last we saw of them, then.
"Did you ever hear of a thief stopping to have his picture taken?" Westy asked.
"If they'd have only stayed a little longer, we could have got them in the movie camera and we could have a play called The Robbers' Regret," Pee-wee piped up, "or, The Missing Spark Plugs."
"Oh, they're not missing," Westy said; "they're just hiding, disguised as an oil can. Waste not, want not, hey?"
Do you know what that fellow had done—all while we were in the car? Talk about a scout being quick! He had got the snapshots while those two fellows were on the platform. Then he had hid the camera in the bushes. But he wanted to make sure that they wouldn't find the plugs, so he put them into an oil can that he had found under the hood of the machine and tied a piece of wire to the can. He tied the other end of the wire to the root of a bush on the shore. And all that he did while the fellows were in the car. What do you know about that?
So now he just fished them up and cleaned them out and put them back where they belonged. Then we all sat in the Pierce-Arrow waiting to see what would happen next. Right in front of us was that old car with the sign all along its side.