got any right down here. I'll let you see some logic, whatever that is.
You can set up there and I'll set down here, and you can stay till the
sign rots. You're such clever youngsters. Always on top, huh? Well, you
can stay up there with Brown's hats and see how you like it. This land
down here belongs to me, by gum!"

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE SIEGE

He sat down on a nice big comfortable rock and took out a pipe and
filled it and started smoking. He looked as if he was going to stay
there for a couple of years or so.

Will Dawson said, "Now you see what we get for standing on our rights.
About ten years from now our skeletons will be found sitting on this
sign."

"Always on top," Westy said.

"If we go down there we get arrested; if we stay up here we starve,"
Hunt said.

"Sure, that's logic," I said. "I'm not so crazy about being part of an
ad."

"We've got a right here, it's a technicality," the kid said.

"Yes, but I'm not so stuck on technicalities," I told him. "You can't
eat them."

"Let's drown our sorrows in song," Westy said.

So then we all started singing and this is what we worked around to:

"We're here because we're here,
Deny it if you dare;
And the reason we're up here,
Is because we're not down there."

I said, "Believe me, I've had enough of the advertising business. I'm
getting hungry. The next time I pose it will be for a restaurant."

"I'm going to retire from the hat business," Tom Warner said. "See where
it's left us."

I said, "Sure, we've risen very high in the hat business. We've risen to
the top. How about our bee-line hike?"

"We can go through everything except a jail," Westy said.

The farmer just sat there on the rock with one knee over the other,
smoking his pipe, very calm like.

I said, "I wonder if we could go to sleep here like birds?"

"Pee-wee ought to be able to," Westy said.

"Sure, he's a canary----"

"Will you keep still with that?" the kid yelled.

"I wish the weekly animated news of all the world could see us now," I
said. "'_Boy Scouts marooned on an ad_,' that's what they'd put.
'_Starving on a desert advertising sign._'"

The farmer down there on the rock didn't laugh at all, he just sat there
smoking.

"This is a siege," the kid said.

"We're blockaded," another one shouted.

"I bet Minerva Skybrow could get us out of this," I said. "Anybody who
likes algebra----Hey, Scout Harris, I thought you said that a scout i