“He’ll see that they do good turns,” the kid shouted. Gee whiz, good turns are his favorite fruit—good turns and doughnuts. Even if he had a turning lathe he couldn’t turn out any more good turns.
Now maybe you know what a tornado is. Anyway, there wasn’t any that day. So you don’t need to worry. But all of a sudden dark clouds came and pretty soon the sky was all black and the wind was blowing like anything. I guess it was a cyclone, all right, only it decided not to come that way on account of the road being so bad.
Anyway the wind kept up and blew right in our faces and after a while Brent said, “Did you bring those old togs along, kid?”
Pee-wee said, “You mean the convict suit? It’s in the van.”
“Well, get me the coat and I’ll slip it on,” Brent told him. “We may not be able to catch the convict, but I’m blamed sure I’ll catch cold.”
So Pee-wee went around and into the van by the doors in back and got the convict’s jacket. I guess none of us thought there was anything funny about Brent wearing it for a little while. Only I said to him, just joking like, “You wanted to be a convict, now you’ve got your wish.”
“If my mother could only see me now,” he said. “Do I look like a zebra, Pee-wee?”
We had to laugh, he looked so funny in that striped jacket; but anyway it was a pretty lonely road and we weren’t likely to meet anybody.
Pretty soon we began passing houses, and Brent took the jacket off and threw it back into the van through the little window in front. In about five minutes we came to a village. I said, “Go slow or you’ll run over it.” The village was almose right underneath the van. The main street of that village was all black and sticky from tar and oil that they had been sprinkling on it and pretty soon we came to the sprinkler, standing still right in the middle of the road, with a couple of men near it.
We had to stop because we couldn’t get past, so we just sat there on the seat, watching them. The sprinkler wouldn’t work and they were trying to fix it. One man was sticking a piece of wire into all the little holes along the pipe that ran crossways at the back of the big tank.