Brent said, “I’m not thinking about being arrested, I’m thinking about escaping.”
“Well, you can’t escape from a dry goods van,” I told him.
He said, awful sad, kind of, “I know it. Oh, if I were only Eliza and could be pursued by ferocious bloodhounds.”
I said, “Well, you can’t have everything. You’ve done pretty well so far.”
“Sure you have,” Pee-wee whispered; “there’s one of those notices tacked up in the Post Office, and everybody is talking about that fellow escaping. I told them that often boy scouts find missing people. I was telling them about good turns, and I said we’d be on the lookout.”
“I hope they won’t look in” Brent said.
“What else did you tell them?” I asked him, good and scared. Because I knew that if our young hero had been able to round up an audience in the Post Office, most likely he had given them the whole history of the Boy Scouts of America and a lot of other stuff besides.
“I was telling them about good turns,” he said. “There was an old lady there and I carried a big bundle out to her carriage for her.”
“And that’s all you told them?” I asked him.
“I told them we were going to the Veterans’ Reunion at Grumpy’s Cross-roads,” he said.