Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris: As Good As His Word - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 9

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Presently Pee-wee saw workmen emerging from the building letting down the straps of their overalls as they came forth in groups, some clambering out through the unglazed frame of the big store window.

“Hey, mister, what’s the matter?” Pee-wee asked, forgetting, in his curiosity, to deposit his load in the big box. He saw now that citizens of Barrel Alley were gathering about; he was one of quite a little group.

“Nartin’s de matter, nartin’ at all,” said the man, never looking at Pee-wee and speaking with an air of careless superiority.

Several of the men who had been carrying a beam laid it down across the new sidewalk which had not yet hardened and left it there. The man of the black derby cast a look of approval at them and made a gesture indicating satisfaction at a man who laid down an electrical chandelier fixture at the curb and proceeded to remove his overalls. Instinctively Pee-wee knew a strike had been called and he knew that the loitering audience was in sympathy with it.

Then suddenly he became aware of something which passed his young comprehension. Being a scout, he gazed on what he next saw with as much wonder as if he were witnessing a miracle. But a few minutes before a wagon with a flat mattressed body had backed up against the curb and two workmen had carefully lifted a large square of plate glass from it. This now stood at the edge of the curb, the men holding it upright as the wagon moved away. The glass was half on the sidewalk and half out over the curb and a man held it at either end.

Suddenly Pee-wee saw the man in the derby hat wave his hand impatiently in the direction of these men, and to his consternation beheld the men lower the glass, anything but gently, toward the sidewalk. Whether they actually intended to drop it Pee-wee did not know. But to lay it down half on the sidewalk and half in the street was enough. In any case it could hardly escape damage. By a quick impulse he dropped his burden and ran forward grasping one end of the tilting glass.

“Dirty little strike-breaker,” he heard some one mutter. “Get away from there.”

“You get away yourself,” Pee-wee shouted to no one in particular. “I’d rather be a strike-breaker than a glass breaker. Gee whiz, this glass is worth a lot of money, it is.”

The men who had let go the glass just as Pee-wee’s hands touched it seemed quite unconcerned about its fate. They began removing their overalls and collecting some tools. Some one, Pee-wee did not know who, threw a lump of sticky putty in his face. Slatternly women laughed sneeringly. Some one said something about trash from “up Terrace Avenue.”

But the sturdy little scout from up Terrace Avenue clutched tightly an edge of the great sheet of glass with one hand, his other hand laid against the flat surface to steady it. The glass moved a little on the sidewalk and he adjusted his bracing attitude to meet the danger. Strength and skill were both required, and forbearance too, for the vulgar loiterers, hoodlums ready for any mischief, hatless women holding babies, and harsh-voiced girls of the Barrel Alley stamp, laughed and jeered as they wandered off.

“Give us a hand, will you?” Pee-wee called to one atrocious looking urchin whose sole garment seemed to be a pair of men’s trousers draped like a Grecian garb about his form. “Hey, give us a hand, will you? Come on, do a good turn.”

The urchin seemed in two minds about complying, but was ordered into a nearby house by his mother. “Show ’im wot ’e’s up agin, the fresh little scab,” she said.

It was surprising how soon the scene of the unfinished building was deserted. In five minutes not a sign of a workman was there about the place. The audience, too, had dispersed and disappeared into its squalid homes.

And there was Scout Harris laboring under that towering slab of fabulous value, valiantly striving like a wrestler to get the right hold upon it as it swayed and sometimes slid a little on the sidewalk. He seemed very small and insignificant beside that great, shiny, transparent square which towered above him, swaying now and then and standing upright again like a tipsy man.

“Gee whiz,” said Pee-wee, breathing hard, “as long—oh, boy—as long as I can—whoooaaaa—the pacific gravy—gravity—I’m—as long as the pacific gravity is—I can keep it standing—only——”

He released one hand for just a second in order to wipe its perspiration off on his trousers. And just then a bell sounded in the distance and he saw up at the next corner an automobile covered with garish posters and in it a man shouting lustily through a huge megaphone:

“Iceberg pies! Iceberg pies! We’re giving them away! Free samples! Send the kiddies! Free samples of the latest and most deeee—licious concoction for a summer day! Iceberg pies! Free to the kiddies! Get your free samples! They melt in your mouth! Cooling and refreshing. Free samples, to-day only! They’re deeeeeee—licious!”