Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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When the picturesque old court-house in Bridgeboro burned down, the catastrophe proved a blessing to two persons, Pee-wee Harris and the County Engineer. The County Engineer acquired a million dollars in the building of the large, new court-house, and Pee-wee got on the trail of an adventure which took him far afield and ended, of course, in unqualified triumph and glory.

Pee-wee was always lucky. If he fell out of a tenth story window, he would be certain to alight plunk in the middle of a huge apple pie or, perchance, a shock-absorbing sponge cake. His disasters were all triumphs.

Some boys run into good luck. Pee-wee invariably took a double-header into it. Sometimes he backed into it—accidentally on purpose. But head first or feet first, it made very little difference since his feet and his head were only two or three feet or so apart.

You could not say ever that Pee-wee was wrong side up, any more than you could say that a baseball is wrong side up. It is true that he often plunged headlong and blindfolded into his greatest achievements. But he took all the credit just the same. And if there was anything to eat he took that also. He was more than a scout; he was about six scouts, highly compressed.

We are not to follow in the trail of the County Engineer which led through a jungle of dubious politics. But we shall endeavor to keep up with Pee-wee even when his adventurous route takes us through mud. It was at least good clean mud, and not the mud of county politics. Our new court-house is an ornament to the town, but the biggest thing in town is Pee-wee.

This story begins on the morning after the fire. The old court-house burned down on Friday night, June third. It is important to remember that. All the Bridgeboro boys were there, Pee-wee included, and the scouts rendered much service to the authorities. It was a terrible disaster, such a fire as Bridgeboro had never before seen.

But when the show was over that was an end of it for Roy Blakeley and Pee-wee’s other friendly enemies. They went on a hike bright and early Saturday morning. Pee-wee, having lost several golden hours of sleep at the fire, emerged rather late in the morning, and hit the trail into the dining-room where he partook of a huge, belated breakfast. Then finding himself alone in the world, he strolled down to the green to look over the ruins of the old court-house.

It was characteristic of Pee-wee to do this. The scene of such a dramatic event held a certain fascination for him even after the excitement had passed. He loved to gaze at houses which had the reputation of being haunted. He followed ambulances and police patrols, and lingered at their destinations after these doleful conveyances were no longer to be seen. Houses which had been burglarized held a spell for him. Even the poor little house occupied by the Liventi brothers was viewed with awe by Pee-wee, because the parents of those swarthy youngsters “acted in real shows.” It was not until Pee-wee made acquaintance of the brothers that the little house lost its spell.

The scene of the fire was far from the spectacle of glory it had been the night before. Clad in roaring flames the old building had been an inspiring sight. But now there was nothing but damp ruin.

A few people stood at the rope which had been drawn across the green to keep the public out, gazing at the broken, charred and soaked wreckage.

How strange and out of place seemed all that paraphernalia of the old building, pulled or thrown out into the open in the battle with those demon flames! There was not much dignity to the judge’s bench as it lay there upside down in the soggy grass with one end of it smashed and a lot of saturated legal papers tumbling out of its broken drawer. Commitments, writs, indictments, warrants, affidavits—much the merry blaze and the shooting water had cared about these things!

Pee-wee being a scout (always in uniform) was a privileged character, and he was not reticent about letting the loiterers see this. With a pardonable touch of ostentation he stooped under the rope, to the gaping envy of several youthful members of the South Bridgeboro gang, and, unchallenged by the cop who was on guard in the enchanted precinct, strode into the very heart of the devastated area.

“I’m a scout and I got to do public services and things so that shows I got a right to go anywhere,” he tactfully advised the watchful officer.

Upon which declaration his foot became involved with a ladder which lay coyly secreted amid the debris and he went kerplunk on his face.

“Anywheres yer loike,” said the subservient officer.