Читать книгу Roy Blakeley's Happy-go-lucky Hike - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

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Now you can get ready for a good laugh because I’m going to tell you about our famous Good Turn hike because it had so many turns in it. It’s got a lot of names to it too, but that’s the name I gave it and what I say goes, not saying where it goes to. If you want to see where it goes to, you better follow us, only you do it at your own risk and you won’t get anything to eat because we’ve only got enough for four and one of them is Pee-wee Harris and he counts for six, so that’s ten.

But anyway even if there are not so many eats, there are a lot of names to this hike, only you can’t eat them, so what good are they? There were four of us that went, just counting human beings. There was one dog and he was a mut. After we got home, not saying what happened, Wig Weigand said we should name it the Hike of the Merry Mut—that shows how smart he is with all his fancy talk and everything. Vic Norris, he’s in the Elks, he said we should call it the Now you see it, now you don’t Hike. I told him if I used a name as long as that there wouldn’t be any room for the story, and believe me it’s going to take a lot of room—even as much as two towns and about five villages. Pee-wee Harris said we should call it the Hilarious Hike—he got that word out of the dictionary. I said, “I don’t care, call it the Harum-Scarum Hike if you want to; we’ll call it by all four names, what’s the difference?”

“You can’t have four names for one story,” he started yelling.

“Listen who’s talking so soft and low,” I said. “You can have five helpings of dessert in one dinner because I can prove it by yourself.”

“That’s different,” he shouted.

“Sure, it’s the same only different,” Vic said.

“You can have as many names as you want to a story,” I told him; “you don’t have to use them all.”

“You haven’t got any sense,” the kid shouted.

“We’re not going to use any of that either,” I said. “So now will you please kindly keep still till I find out if it’s thundering in the sky?”

So then he shut up for about three seconds, maybe two. When Pee-wee keeps still it sounds like a graveyard all around. Anyway now I’m going to tell you about what happened, and I’m going to start like a bedtime story. It was a beautiful sunny morning when we all started out one afternoon to do an especially big good turn like boy scouts are supposed to do every day—you don’t have to do them at night, it doesn’t say it in the handbook.

So now this is the start of the story about what really happened and you needn’t write me any letter to find out if we’re real boys—you’d think we were correct imitations the way some scouts down south especially out west keep writing me letters to know if I’m alive. Believe me, as soon as I’m dead I’ll let you know. Any minute I’m likely to die laughing, especially in this story that’s all true.

It starts with us needing five dollars and it ends with us needing three new stockings and one hat and an empty cartridge and a compass and two buttons off a scout shirt and a scarf and a piece of tin foil that chocolate came in and a hook that belonged on a rope and something to eat. Believe me we started at the bottom and worked our way down. If we had stayed out much longer there wouldn’t have been anything left of us at all and we wouldn’t have had to bother to come home. A tin cup too, we lost that. It was a kind of a rainbow hike because there was one scout from each patrol in our troop. There was a Silver Fox—I was that one. I’m the one that always gets up hikes, like Cook’s Tours without any cooking. Vic Norris comes from the Elks and I don’t blame him. I’d come from it too if I was in it. They’re always going out somewhere with their mothers, that bunch. Wig Weigand, he’s in the Ravens, his right name is Wigley—gee, what a name. We call him Wigwag because he’s crazy about signalling. Pee-wee Harris is in the Chipmunks, if you want to make him mad call it the Chipskunks. Anyway it won’t last long because there are only six of them and about ten of them are going to move away, what does he care? He can rob the cradle for some more. Most always when he gets new scouts he gets twins—two helpings. He got the idea from dinner. He’s an after dinner speaker, also before dinner and after breakfast and before supper and just after lunch. His talking hours are from 6 A. M. to 6 A. M. He’s all the time laying down the law and picking it up and carrying it around with him. He invented the Boy Scouts of America. Don’t blame me, I didn’t ask him to go along.

It was a beautiful sunny morning—it was the same sunny morning I told you about before. I was mowing our lawn, that was the second day after school closed. This summer, my sister’s going to have a big garden and I won’t have so much lawn to mow, but I’m going to get the dollar a week just the same. We got a dandy big lawn as long as you don’t have to mow it. It was a beautiful sunny—now I have to go to lunch, then I’ll tell you.

That straight line means I had lunch, so now it’s a beautiful summer afternoon and I was mowing the lawn when all of a sudden I noticed a dog—he wasn’t so big—watching me. I think he was about forty-second cousin to a fox terrier. He was white and he had some black spots, and there was a big one on one side of his head, so it was black around one of his eyes and white around the other. Every time I started pushing the mower he kept dancing all around and when I stopped he’d come up and start sniffing at it. He would keep kind of dancing around in front of it, almost getting run over. “Will you get out of the way,” I said to him. Jiminies, I couldn’t chase him away. Every time I did he came back and started in again. I guess he never saw a lawn mower before.

All of a sudden along came a great big jelly doughnut with Pee-wee Harris behind it. “Will you please get on the outside of that so I can see you?” I asked him.

His mouth was so full he could hardly talk. He said, “What are you doing, mowing the lawn?”

I said, “No, I’m shovelling the wind off the grass. Ask me another.”

That’s the end of this chapter. When the next one starts you’ll hear Pee-wee talking, so you can skip it if you want to.