pedestrians.
Stretched across the sidewalk between two tin cans its function was to
catch in the feet of passersby, thus pulling the clamorous cans about
the ankles of the victim. Keekie Joe had always found this game
diverting and he was wont to vary its surprises by filling the cans
with muddy water.

But on this eventful night he was driven to dismantle the apparatus and
consecrate it to a new use. For Keekie Joe was hungry and he dared not
go home; so he was going fishing.

The hours following the crap game had not been golden hours for the
sentinel of Barrel Alley. When he emerged from the tenement and
rejoined Pee-wee after the episode of the crap game, he had ten cents
that his father had given him with which to buy a package of cigarettes.

Keekie Joe was never able to consider consequences at a distance of
more than ten minutes into the future. When he played hooky from
school on Thursday it never occurred to him that he would be answerable
to the powers that be on Friday. Notwithstanding that he was a
sentinel he could never look ahead. And when Keekie Joe smoked several
of his father's cigarettes on the way home, it never occurred to him
that he would have to remain away from home through supper time, and
until his father had retired for the night.

Thus it was that at nine o'clock or thereabouts, Keekie Joe realized
that he was hungry and that four cigarettes stood between him and home,
effectually barring the way. He measured the licking that he would get
against the supper that he would get, and he decided to go fishing. No
doubt his choice was well considered for the supper that he would get
might not be a good one whereas the licking that he would get would be
nothing short of magnificent.

Keekie Joe had not the slightest idea how to cook a fish and he could
not think so far ahead as that. But food he must have. So he had dug
some worms and put them in one of his trick cans and then proceeded to
untangle the line. Having secured an unknotted length of five or six
feet he equipped this with a fish-hook of his own manufacture and
sallied forth toward the river. He was not only hungry, but sleepy,
and it never occurred to him that this was the exorbitant price of four
cigarettes.

Hunger and sleep vied with each other in the shuffling body of Keekie
Joe as he crossed Main Street and cut across the fields toward the
marshes.

Down by the river was a little shanty in which was a mass of