Читать книгу Roy Blakeley on the Mohawk Trail - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 8

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So then we were in the Berkshires—we were in Great Barrington. Gee whiz, I don’t know why they call it great. It wasn’t so great. But anyway it was dark when we went through it.

It didn’t make any difference which way we went as long as we kept going, so we went on a good rough road. We wanted those other fellows to get shaken up while they were trying to eat their supper.

Every now and then one of them shouted, “Have a heart, will you!” Brent said he guessed they were passing around hearts. Pee-wee thought Brent said tarts and he woke up, then went to sleep again on the back seat. Every time we went over a couple of Berkshires he almost fell off the seat. The Berkshires were all around us, but most of the time they were underneath us.

Gee whiz, my mother says she can just feel the mountains when she’s in the country. Believe me, I felt those all right.

Pretty soon I knew they were sleeping back in the trailer; I knew on account of the silence—there was a lot of it.

I said to Brent, “Where are we?”

He said, “I don’t know; wasn’t that a village we just ran over? Here’s a bridge, but the sign says unsafe. I suppose the bridge is just intended to shade the fishes from the sun—especially the sunfish. Shall we go over it?”

“Sure, go over it,” I said. “The sign is just a kind of a warning to go slow, I guess.”

He said, “Maybe it means the river hasn’t any opposite shore; then there wouldn’t be any other end to the bridge. Did you ever see a river with only one shore? India is full of them.”

We went over the bridge kind of slow and I said, “Do you think you can keep from going asleep all night?”

Brent said, “I can keep from going anywhere. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?”

“Every which way,” I said.

Brent said, “Well, I hope we’ll get there.”

I said, “Sure, there’s no harm having a destination as long as we don’t use it.”

That woke Pee-wee up—it was either that or a big bump we went over. He shouted, “What do you mean having a destination and not using it? You’ve got to use it or it isn’t one! That shows how much you know about logic!”

“You mean you can’t keep a destination for a rainy day?” I asked.

“A destination is a place you go to!” he yelled. Brent said, “Well, then, is sleep a destination? Suppose you go there. If you have any destinations go ahead and use them; Roy and I don’t need any, do we, Roy?”

“We wouldn’t take one if it was offered to us,” I said.

So then Pee-wee went to sleep again; logic is his favorite sport outside of eating. Gee whiz, if you’re reading this book turn the pages quietly so you won’t wake him up.

So then we kept on going over Berkshires. We went through Stockbridge; we knew because we could see the name on the railroad station, and we went through Chester and some kind of a Four Corners—I couldn’t see its first name. We slowed up the car there for just a second and Brent said, “Which one of these four roads shall I take?”

“Take them all,” I said.

“They don’t belong to me.”

“If we take the Four Corners there won’t be any village left,” I said.

He said, “Well, it serves them right leaving it right in the middle of the road. I think I’ll take the road that goes north; that ought to go to Adams—but they don’t always do what they ought to do, these roads.”

“One’s as good as another,” I told him.

“Even better,” he said.

“As long as we keep going and don’t stop the engine.”

So then we just kept going and going and going through villages and over hills and things and now we’re going to bump right into the end of this chapter.

You should worry, nobody hurt.