? The boy that
delivered the newspapers was on a strike. He was on a sympathy strike,
that's what the man in the candy store told us. He was on a sympathy
strike on account of the steel strikers. He read in a book that car
wheels are made out of compressed paper sometimes, and as long as some
of them were made out of steel, too, he decided he wouldn't deliver the
papers that Saturday, on account of the newspaper being printed on
paper. Gee whiz, I don't see how a paper could be printed on anything
else except paper. That paper only came out twice a week, because there
wasn't much news in Skiddyunk.

As long as we only had forty-two cents we decided it was best to buy
five ice-cream cones, because then we'd have only seventeen cents left
and we couldn't send a telegram. Pee-wee said it was best not to have
any temptation to send a telegram.

We asked the man in the candy store if he thought the people who lived
in Skiddyunk would come to a movie show in Ridgeboro that night. He said
they would if they knew about it, only he didn't see where we could have
it there. So then we told him about our car.

He said, "Is it a movie theatre?"

"You said it," I told him; "it moves all over. Even the Strand Theatre
in New York doesn't move so much. And anyway," I said, "are there any
fish in that lake?"

He said if there were only as many people up there in Ridgeboro as there
were fish in the lake that Ridgeboro would be as big as New York.

"Good night!" I said.

He said they just stood in a row up there waiting to be caught. He said
nobody had to starve around that way, if he had a fish-hook.

I said, "I wouldn't eat a fish-hook no matter how hungry I was."

He was a nice man, that fellow in the candy store. He started to laugh
and he said he guessed we wouldn't starve, because he could see we were
a wide-awake lot.

"You ought to have seen us last night," Wig said; "we reminded ourselves
of Rip Van Winkle."

So then he told us it would be good for us to see Mr. Tarkin who printed
the Skiddyunk _News_. First we got some fish-hooks and a ball of cord
and then we had five cents left--a cent each. Never laugh at poverty.
Then we went to the place where the Skiddyunk _News_ was printed and
asked for Mr. Tarkin. He was in a little bit of an office with papers
all over the floor.

I said, "We're boy scouts and our railroad car that we're going to use
for a troop room is on a side track up at Ridgeboro, because it was
bro