“And another thing I know about you, too: you started taking Italian in the Academic course. I bet you can speak Italian. I know the girl that used to sit next to you before you went to the High School; I pulled her on a sled once. You know the girl I mean. She was always eating chocolate. Believe me, I have to admit that you’ve got more sense than we have, and if you’ll help us to keep this blamed wagon out of our path of glory till the milk train comes we’re going to give a big racket in your honor when we get our car down to the field near the river, if we ever do.
“Honest, Minerva, to tell you the truth, we can’t eat another thing, and I see that what counts most in the world is brains—brains and mushrooms. But, gee whiz, I like ice cream, too.”
The next minute that girl started talking Italian to Tony, and, oh, boy, you should have seen him. Right away he got excited and wanted to dig up the whole earth. I guess she told him there was a gold mine where his wagon had been standing.
I don’t know if you know much about mushrooms, but they’re easy to raise and you can get a lot of money for them, and that’s something that most scouts don’t know about. All you need is a place that’s kind of damp and dark, like under a car or a wagon or in a cellar that hasn’t got any heat. It’s a lot of fun raising them. Maybe that’s why they call them fungi. Anyway, Minerva Skybrow put the fun in fungi for us all right, because now we have a dandy little mushroom patch under our car down by the river and the only competition we have in Bridgeboro is from Tony. We should worry.
Every Saturday morning people come down to Van Schlessenhoff’s field to buy mushrooms from us. Only you’ve got to be careful, because if you eat the wrong kind of mushrooms, the first thing you know some fine day you’ll wake up and find yourself dead. So you better read what the handbook says about them.
The kind we raise are dandy big ones and we call them the _Skybrow mushroom_, and they’re known far and wide—all the way up as far as Main Street.
Now for the rest of that afternoon we helped Tony dig up mushrooms and plant them in boxes and spread more of them in the space where his wagon belonged, and Minerva Skybrow managed the whole business. I guess it must have been after six o’clock when we heard the milk train whistling, and, believe me, we were all pretty tired when it pulled into the station.