We all sat up at once and stared up the road. And, oh boy, as sure as you live, there was that old scissors-grinding wagon coming toward us, and the donkey should have been arrested for speeding, because he was going about two inches a year. Up on the seat sat our Italian friend, smoking a pipe.
“Hey, Tony!” I shouted. “Have you got any matches or sandwiches, or sawdust or spaghetti or old scissors or pieces of leather or rye bread or peanuts or steel nuts or pie or anything else we can eat? We’re starving.”
“Hey, boss, how you do?” he shouted. He was smiling all over.
CHAPTER XIX
WE EAT
That man had a lot of lunch, pickles and bologna and a pail of spaghetti and bread and everything, and there was only one thing that we didn’t like about it, and that was that he had already eaten it about an hour before. So it didn’t do us much good. It only made us hungrier when he told us about it. He said, “Badda luck, hey, Boss? Spagett, ah, what d’you call it, nice. You lika, huh?”
Warde said, “We don’t like spaghetti that’s already passed into history.”
“We don’t like history, anyway,” I said. “But have you got any matches?”
The man said, “Hey, sure, boss, plenty de match.”
So he gave us some matches and about half a loaf of shiny looking bread that he had left from his own lunch and then he went along across the bridge. We asked him how business was and he said, “No biz.”
After that we got our fire started and we cooked our fish on the tin that Pee-wee had found and, yum yum, but that lunch tasted good. Maybe if you were ever a starving mariner shipwrecked on a desert island, you’ll know how that lunch tasted.