PEE-WEE HARRIS ON THE TRAIL




CHAPTER I

THE LONE FIGURE


The night was bleak and cold. All through the melancholy, cheerless day,
the first chill of autumn had been in the air. Toward evening the clouds
had parted, showing a steel-colored sky in which the sun went down a
great red ball, tinting the foliage across the river with a glow of
crimson. A sun full of rich light but no heat.

The air was heavy with the pungent fragrance of burning leaves. The
gutters along Main Street were full of these fluttering, red memorials
of the good old summer-time.

But there were other signs that the melancholy days had come. Down at
the Bridgeboro station was a congestion of trunks and other luggage
bespeaking the end of the merry play season. And saddest of all, the
windows of the stationery stores were filled with pencil-boxes and blank
books and other horrible reminders of the opening of school.

Look where one would, these signs confronted the boys of Bridgeboro, and
there was no escaping them. Even the hardware store had straps and tin
lunch boxes now filling its windows, the same window where fishing rods