“Haven’t we been hunting for the will?” Sandy blurted right out.
The girl just looked at us and then, goodnight, she started laughing. Boy, I never saw anybody laugh so hard. She said, “Oh it’s just too excruciating!”
“You think you’re big using hard words,” the kid said. “What do we care about wills? Do you say robbers aren’t more important than wills? If you saw what I saw last night you wouldn’t be standing there laughing like a—like a hyena. A regular robber’s den.”
The girl said, “Well, if that’s what you saw you’d better run and tell the police. But I bet all you saw was the camp of the moving picture people who have a regular robber’s cave over in the chasm and they’re making part of a picture there. We’ve been over there three or four times to watch them. And, oh I think you’re just too funny for anything!”
Oh boy, I wish you could have seen Pee-wee! He just stared at her.
She said, “Don’t tell me it was a little rush-covered lean-to that you saw! Why that’s the place where the kidnapped child is taken to—and kept there by the robbers. Mr. Hartley, he’s one of the robbers, and he’s a perfectly lovely man. He comes up here to town lots and lots.”
“I guess he was here last night,” I said.
Even still, Pee-wee just stared.
I said, “Well there’s only one thing for us to do now and that is to rescue that child from the moving picture robbers. Anyway I feel the need of an ice cream cone to keep me from laughing to death.”
Even after we started away the girl was sitting there on the porch steps laughing at us. I was glad when we got around the corner. Pee-wee didn’t say a single word.