Li'l Genius #26

When Li'l Genius and Li'l Tomboy accompany Li'l Genius's father on a delivery of recovered jewelry to a jeweler, they spot a pair of crooks tailing him—and decide to stop the thieves themselves without letting their pop know about the danger. Using quick thinking and clever tricks, the kids work to protect the shipment and catch the criminals before they can strike.

Li'l Genius takes on a delivery job for half a dollar, carefully transporting an artist's prized painting to Mrs. Van Sawbuck—but a series of mishaps on the way threatens to wreck the masterpiece entirely. When he finally arrives with the battered canvas, he discovers something entirely unexpected about how his client views the damaged artwork.

When Li'l Tomboy catches wind that Slicko the Magician is performing in town, she camps out at the stage door hoping to land a job as his assistant—but after he turns her down, she sneaks into the matinee and decides to help anyway. What follows is a delightful backstage disaster as her "improvements" to his tricks send the performance wildly off the rails, complete with unexpected poultry and mysterious objects tumbling out of his hat.

When Atom the Cat challenges a crowd stuck in their conformist ways, Percy steps up with a radical prescription: abandon old ideas and reinvent yourselves. But a visit to Percy's own neighborhood might just prove that breaking free from routine is easier said than done.

A boy stuck on a quiet island with his father finds an old bottle and playfully writes a fake distress message, tossing it into the sea just for fun. When fishermen discover the bottle and rush to Floogle Island to help, things don't go quite as Ollie planned—but by the story's end, he discovers that his little joke has brought something he actually wanted all along.