“It’s got stripes—wide stripes,” the kid shouted. “Look there! See it? It’s a zebra! Don’t you know a zebra?”
Brent said, “I wouldn’t know one if I met him in the street.”
By that time Tom had gone ahead of us and hauled something out of the bushes. It wasn’t a zebra, but it had stripes all right—it was light colored and it had wide, dark stripes. I bet you can’t guess what it was, either.
It was a suit of convicts’ clothes.
CHAPTER XIII—TOM SLADE, SCOUT
“Didn’t I tell you it had stripes?” Pee-wee shouted. “Wasn’t I right? Now you see! A scout is observant.”
“If he sees a suit of clothes he thinks it’s a zebra,” Charlie Seabury said.
Harry said, “Well, you weren’t so far wrong, Kiddo. The stripes weren’t on an animal; they were on a jail bird. I’d like to know where he flew away to. This is getting interesting. I knew that clothing was very high, but I didn’t think we’d find a suit as far up as this.”
“Maybe he was a murderer, hey?” Pee-wee whispered.
“We can only hope,” Brent said in that funny way. Then he said, “I’ve always felt that I’d like to be a murderer. I thought I was a real convict when I was held in jail three hours after speeding in my flivver. But when I look at this striped suit, I realize that after all I didn’t amount to much as a criminal. Let’s take a squint at those clothes, will you? It’s always been the dream of my young life to escape from jail by using a hair-pin or a manicure file or some kind of acid. I wonder how this fellow escaped.”