"

"Der yez swipe de pertaters?" Joe asked.

"We don't exactly kind of what you would call swipe them," Pee-wee was
forced to confess. "But we get them in ways that are just as good.
They taste just as good as if they were swiped, honest they do," he
hastened to add. "So will you come down by the river with me? That
old railroad car down there is our meeting place and it's got a stove
in it and everything and there won't be any one there to-day except
just you and me and we'll have an election and I'll vote for you and
you can vote for yourself and so you'll be sure to be elected patrol
leader. And after that I'll show you what you have to do and most of
it is eating and things like that. So will you say yes?"

Keekie Joe was not to be lured by promises of "eats," though he was
curious about the old railroad car. His answer to Pee-wee was
characteristic of him. "I woudn' join 'em, because they're a lot of
sissies," he said, "but yer needn' be ascared ter come down here
because I woudn' leave no guy hurt yer; I woudn' leave 'em guy yer
because yer a Boy Scout. If any of 'em starts guyen yer he'll get an
upper cut, see?"

Pee-wee went on his way thoroughly disappointed and disheartened. His
thought was not that he had made a friend, but that he had lost a
possible recruit. He had cherished no thought of reforming the wicked
and uplifting the lowly in his effort to enlist this outlandish denizen
of the slums. He was not the goody-goody little scout propagandist
that we sometimes read about. He had simply been desperate and had
lost all sense of discrimination. Anything would do if he could only
start a patrol. What this sturdy little scout failed to understand was
that in this particular enterprise the Boy Scouts had lost out but that
Pee-wee Harris had won.

CHAPTER VII

APPLE BLOSSOM TIME

Pee-wee stopped in Bennett's Fresh Confectionery and regaled his
drooping spirit with a chocolate soda. Then he continued his stroll up
Main Street. He had always advertised his conviction that things
invariably came his way but nothing came his way on this lonely
Saturday morning.

He paused here and there gazing idly into shop windows, he stood gaping
at a man who was having trouble with his auto, and at last he wandered
into the public library. The place seemed like a tomb on that Saturday
morning in the springtime. Not a boy was there to be seen. "Gee whiz,
they've got something better to do than