CHAPTER III—WE INSPECT PEE-WEE’S POCKETS
Pee-wee went jumping and dancing around like a cat having a fit, all the while waving the letter in the air.
“What is this? Some new kind of wig-wag signalling?” I asked him.
“Now you see! Now you see!” he started shouting. “Talk about your pirate ships! One fellow dropped in his tracks—what more do you want? Another one was wounded; see? Now!” I said, “Oh, I’m not complaining. Six would have been better, but one is better than nothing. You win, Kid. This old piece of rolling junk has had a past; I admit it. It’s been through adventures.”
“My mother doesn’t believe in adventures, because somebody gets dead,” little Alf piped up in that funny way he has.
“Well somebody got dead here, all right,” I told him. “I wish we knew all about it.”
“Look—look here!!” Pee-wee fairly yelled. “Here’s the hole!”
He had pulled a little wooden button, something like a cork, out of the woodwork at the side of the car, just a little below the window-sill, and was wriggling his finger in a little round hole that the daylight showed through.
“Now you see!” he shouted. “Talk about dark pasts——”
“You’re right, Kid,” I said; “we have to take off our hats to this old car. It has Blackhead’s old schooner Mary Ann beaten twenty ways. You win.”