And Keekie Joe dreamed a dream.  A most outlandish dream.  He dreamed that the licorice jaw-breaker which that strange boy had thrown at him was the size of a brick, and that as it fell upon the ground it broke into a thousand luscious fragments like the pane of plate-glass through which Keekie Joe had lately thrown a rock.  He picked up the fragments and ate them, and there before him stood the strange, small boy, who threw a sponge cake directly at his head and hit him with it plunk.  “Wotcher chuckin’ dem at me fer?” Keekie Joe demanded menacingly.

But the small, strange boy (apparently without either fear or manners) scaled a pumpkin pie at him and said, “Do you think I’m scared of you?” He then squirted powdered sugar at him like poison gas and Keekie Joe toppled backward off the fence and could not watch for cops, because his eyes were full of powdered sugar.  “Quit dat, d’yer hear!” he screamed.  But the small, strange boy threw a ham straight at him and it fell on the ground with a thunderous crash and broke into a million thin slices with mustard on them.

The noise of this falling meteor awoke Keekie Joe and he sat up, holding the two sides of his head, startled and dizzy from hunger.  And shining through the doorway of the shack he saw a light.  It was not the moonlight, but another light, and he crept, light-headed and fearful, toward the opening, ready to run in case it was a cop . . .

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MISSIONARY LANDS ON FOREIGN SHORES

What Keekie Joe beheld caused him to rub his eyes and concentrate his gaze with more intensity than ever he had shown while at his official post.  There, bumping against the shore, was somebody or other’s grass-plot with a tree on it and a little tent.  The frightened natives who had witnessed the arrival of Columbus could not have been more astonished than Keekie Joe.

He glanced out upon the river to see if any lawns or groves or back yards were floating around.  Then his gaze returned to the miraculous scene before him.  There was the small boy he had known in the morning, “the rich kid” who had been willing to sit as sentinel on the fence.

He was now sitting on an inverted ice cream freezer and all about him on the grass were sandwiches, hundreds of them.  The tower had fallen and its ruins lay about Pee-wee’s feet.  A lantern hung in the tent and through the opening Keekie Joe caught a glimpse of a board covered with spotless white cloth and piled with such things as he had seen in the windows of bakeries.  The laden board looked as if a cyclone had struck it but in the tumbled chaos his quick and startled glance could distinguish proud and lofty cakes rolled over on their brown or icy superstructures, and doughnuts looking indeed like the cannon-balls which might have laid low these beauteous edifices.