"
And still the man in the moon winked down, and smiled his merry scout
smile upon Scout Harris.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DREAM OF KEEKIE JOE
On that night, in the back yard of Billy Gilson's tire repair shop,
Keekie Joe, the sentinel of Barrel Alley, sat upon a pile of old Ford
radiators, untangling a complicated mass of fishing-line. He was
trying to follow a selected strand through the various fastnesses of
the labyrinth.
The involved mass was really not a fishing-line but, in its untangled
state, an apparatus for confounding and enraging 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.
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