I said, “Will you please give us the flashlight that you took?”
“Hello, sprouts,” he said; “what’s troubling you now?” And he gave me a kind of a push, you know, just as if he was jollying me.
I said, “Will you please give me the flashlight you took?”
“Light? What light?” he said, very innocent like.
“The one you took from in front of my house,” I said. “You’ll either give it to me or I’ll have you arrested. If you think I’m afraid of you, you’re mistaken. And you can keep your hands off me, too. You better button your coat or you’ll be stealing your own watch next.”
“That’s all right,” I said; “I mean what I say.”
He took the flashlight out of the car and said, “You don’t mean this, do you?”
“Yes, I mean that,” I said; “it’s got this fellow’s initials on, so you needn’t try to make us think it’s yours.”
He just gave me a poke with it and kept on laughing. Gee, I was mad.
“Your hands remind me of tanglefoot flypaper,” I said.
“Yes?” he just laughed. “Well, here’s your old light. What’s the matter with you kids? Can’t you take a joke? I just wanted to see if you were good at tracking. You claim to be such great Buffalo Bills——”
I said, “Yes? Well, you’ve got Jesse James looking like a Sunday School teacher.”
“I see you’re all right at trailing,” he said; “here take your light. I was giving you a test. What’s the matter with you?”
He was very easy and offhand like, but I could see he was kind of nervous.
He said, “And I suppose you’ll be telling the whole town about your great stunt.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’d be ashamed to remind the town that there’s such a fellow as you here. All we want is what belongs to us.”
He began digging down in his pocket, all the while saying, “Well, we’ll just keep it a little secret between ourselves and——”
I guess just then he found he didn’t have any money. Because he finished up by saying, “And we’ll have some ice cream sodas the first time I meet you on Main Street. Now how’s that?”
“Sure,” I said, “and we’ll put the spoons in our pockets when we get through.”
“Well, now, you’re not going to go round shouting, huh?” he said, kind of anxious.
Then for the first time Westy spoke. He said, “We promise not to tell anybody, if that’s what you mean. So you needn’t worry about that.”