"He's cornered the food market," said another hungry guest.

"For goodness' sake turn your search-light on him, Dashway," said
Minerva, "and let's see what he looks like. This is simply _tragic_."

Dashway Speeder turned the search-light of his launch across the fiats
and there amid the surrounding mud, still bubbling from the effects of
the departing tide, was presented a scene like unto a picture on a
movie screen. There, bathed in light amid the surrounding gloom, like
a film star in a disk of brightness, sat Scout Harris upon a grocery
box surrounded by fallen sandwiches and with a goodly bowl securely
held between his diminutive knees. It was a superb and mouth-watering
close-up, to use the film phrase.

"I--I might as well eat some things, hey?" me lone voyager called.
"Because it's past time for refreshments anyway and the tide won't
carry me off for more than two hours and everybody'll be going home
then and the ice cream is starting to melt, the lemon ice is getting
all soft, so will it be all right to start eating the chicken salad and
the sandwiches and things? I only kind of sort of tested them so far."

Warde Hollister stopped up his ears in an agony of torture while a
dozen famishing boys flopped this way and that in attitudes of
suffering despair.

"Yes, it will be all right," called poor Minerva in a kind of
desperation. "It's the only thing, you might as well." She seemed
resigned if not reconciled. "You might as well eat the ice cream
anyway, it will only melt."

"And the chicken salad?" called the merciless hero, "and the
sandwiches, too?"

"_Oh, this is too much_," moaned Connie Bennett.

"It isn't so much as you might think," shouted Pee-wee.

"He must be hollow from head to foot," said Margaret.

"Yes, eat everything," wailed Minerva in the final spirit of utter
resignation.

"Yum--yum," called Pee-wee. "Oh, boy, it's good."

And still the man in the moon winked down, and smiled his merry scout
smile upon Scout Harris.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DREAM OF KEEKIE JOE

On that night, in the back yard of Billy Gilson's tire repair shop,
Keekie Joe, the sentinel of Barrel Alley, sat upon a pile of old Ford
radiators, untangling a complicated mass of fishing-line. He was
trying to follow a selected strand through the various fastnesses of
the labyrinth.

The involved mass was really not a fishing-line but, in its untangled
state, an apparatus for confounding and enraging