he group in the middle of the field.

Pee-wee perceived now that the scene of the crap game had been selected
with keen military wisdom, affording a safe avenue of precipitate
retreat in any direction. Disaster could have resulted only from a
surrounding host. Officer McMahon, the tyrant on this squalid beat,
was large. But he was not large enough to surround the camp.

The crap-shooters of Barrel Alley had been surprised in every nook and
corner of their neighborhood until they had hit upon the bold expedient
of playing in an open lot, reposing their trust in a sentinel. It
would not have been well for the sentinel to relax his vigilance.

"What I want ter join them scout kids fer?" Keekie Joe inquired. "Der
yer call me a sissy?"

"Do you call the scouts sissies?" Pee-wee inquired angrily. "They have
more fun than you do, that's one sure thing. If you don't want to join
you don't have to but you don't have to get mad about it. Gee whiz,
you're always mad, kind of. I guess you got up out of the wrong side
of the bed, that's what _I_ think."

This was not true, for indeed Keekie Joe did not sleep in a bed at all;
he slept on a heap of old inner tubes in Ike Levine's tire repair shop.
He was about to resent this slander from Pee-wee with a glowering look
and a threat, when suddenly something happened, which precipitately
terminated his performance of his official functions. His father
called him from a tenement across the street, accompanying his summons
with such dismal predictions of what would happen if he did not obey
that the official sentinel had no choice but to desert his post.

"If I have ter come over there'n git yer," the father said, "I'll----"

Poor Joe glanced at his father in the window, then at the gamesters in
the field. It was evident that chastisement of the severest character
awaited him in any case. For a moment he had a wild notion of making a
spectacular retreat along the street, crawling through a broken part of
the fence beyond the range of parental vision, and resuming his duties
of sentinel at another vantage point. Such a maneuver would at least
postpone a reckoning with his father and enable him to be faithful to
his trust. A very unworthy trust it may have been but his one thought
was to be faithful to it. And there you have Keekie Joe in a
nutshell . . .

CHAPTER V

A QUESTION OF DUTY

Pee-wee's advice to Joe in this predicament was rather singular, and the
s