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.

Keekie Joe gazed upon this scene of mouth-watering ruin with eyes