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.