And here was a shabby, eager-faced boy, with pantaloons like stovepipes almost reaching his ankles and a ticking shirt with a pattern like a checker-board; a quaint, queer youngster, living a million miles from nowhere, telling him that he was no scout, that he was a thief.

“Hey, mister,” Pee-wee shouted to Ham Sanders who drove up, “I’m rescuing this automobile from two men that stole it and I got another one to help me and he was trying to steal it and it belongs to a man I know where I live and I was at the movies with him, and that feller said he’d take it back and this feller says I’m a thief and I’m good and hungry.”

Ham Sanders gave one look at him and said, “Oh, is that so?”

“It’s more than so,” Pee-wee shouted, “and I’m going to stick to this automobile, I don’t care what.  If you say I’m not a scout I can prove it.”

“You needn’t go far to prove it,” said Ham; “we can see you’re not.  Maybe you’re pretty wide awake—­”

“I’m not, I’m sleepy,” Pee-wee shouted.  “Have you got anything to say around here?”

“Well, I think I have, I’m constable,” said Ham.

“Then why aren’t you sure?” Pee-wee retorted.  “Just because I don’t know where I am it doesn’t say I don’t know what I’m talking about, does it?  Will you help me drive this automobile back?  You’ll get some money if you do.  I had an adventure with a couple of thieves and I foiled them; they’ve got seventy pistols.  I was watching The Bandit of Harrowing Highway—­”

“You got into bad company, youngster,” said Ham, surveying Pee-wee’s rakish cap and lawless looking sweater.  “You ought to be thankful you got a chance to get rid of that sort o’ company.  You’re kinder young, I reckon, ain’t you?  Gosh, I calculate you ain’t more’n four foot high.  Kinder young to be mixed up in stealings.”

“You’re the one that’s mixed up,” Pee-wee shouted, “and anyway size doesn’t count.  You can—­you can steal things if you’re—­you’re only a foot high—­if you want to and—­”

“How about all this, Peter?” asked his friend confidentially.

“I’ll tell you,” Pee-wee shouted; “I had a lot of adventures, I know two men that have, shh, they have dead ones to their credit!  I circum—­what d’you call it—­vented them, and that man that just ran away, he was a traitor, but I can—­”

“Can you keep still a second?  One look at you is enough,” said Ham Sanders.

“I’ve—­I’ve got—­three scout suits,” Pee-wee began.

“Like enough you stole ’em,” said Ham.  “You’re one of them runners for crooks, that’s what you are.  I know the kind; they have you to climb in the windows for ’em and all that.  Now you keep still a minute if you know what’s best for you.”

In a brief and threatened few moments of silence Peter told in a whisper how he had seen the signal and read it and stopped the car, and of the flight of the head thief, as he called him.  Between these two excited youngsters Ham hardly knew what to believe.  He certainly did not believe in talking lights appearing over graveyards.  Nor did he credit Pee-wee’s vehement and choppy account of bandits with seventy pistols.