Читать книгу Roy Blakeley's Happy-go-lucky Hike - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 5

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Wig Weigand and Vic Norris said they didn’t care where they went. One place is as good as another if not better, that’s what Wig said. He said he would just as soon kid the life out of Pee-wee as do anything else. That’s our favorite outdoor sport anyway, getting Pee-wee started. Vic said he knew the big white house in Little Valley and he kind of remembered seeing a white dog there. “It’s that big white square house with the cupola,” he said.

So then we all went around to Pee-wee’s. He lives on Terrace Avenue and I wish he’d stay there. There’s a Terrace Avenue in Los Angeles, because Dorry Benton was out there and I wish that was the one Pee-wee lived on. His father’s a doctor, so that’s the way you can tell the house, by the sign. Around by the garage it says

RABBITS FOR SALE

ONE DOLLAR A PIECE

He sells them in pieces. I guess a whole rabbit would be two dollars, anyway nobody ever buys them. He had a carrier pigeon too and he took it up to Temple Camp last summer and tied a note to it and started it home and it hasn’t got here yet. I guess it had a flat tire or something. Doctor Harris says he bet it went to Harrisburg by mistake. Gee, even his own father is laughing at him.

Pee-wee was sitting on the porch and the dog was tied by a rope to one of the posts and when he saw us he started barking and dancing up on his hind legs and pulling on the rope and kind of whining—he was the craziest dog I ever saw.

I said, “Come on, let’s start. Are you going to keep him on that rope?”

He said, “No, I’m going to let him loose after we get out of Bridgeboro and he’ll follow us.”

“Can’t lose him,” Wig said.

Believe me, he was right. That crazy mut kept running back and jumping up on us all the way. “Will you have a heart and keep your feet on the ground!” I said to him. Little Valley is four miles and I bet he ran about twenty miles getting there. He’d run ahead about a couple of hundred feet, then all of a sudden he’d come running back and jump up on us, and then he’d go running ahead again.

After a while I said, “Believe me, this is some favor we’re doing for Pee-wee, walking four miles, and they’re good big ones too, just to return a dog to its owners.”

“You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for the people that live in the big white house,” the kid said. “You’ll be glad enough to have some refreshments with the reward.”

“You said it,” Vic spoke up.

“Leave it to me,” Pee-wee said.

“You mean the refreshments—leave them to you?” I asked him. “Hey, where do your true and tried friends come in, that help you to start a parade to take a dog home? Look at my two stockings and that one of Vic’s, where your friend Tin-can-tin was biting them. And we’ve got three miles still to walk because here we are coming to Tattleboro Crossing.”

“Sure and we’ve got to walk about nine miles out of the way on account of a freight train too,” Vic said. “Look at that long train across the road, I think it’s taking a nap there. Shall we sit down and wait or shall we go around it?”

“I wonder which is the shortest way around,” Wig said.

“I guess they’re each shorter than each other,” I told him. “I know what that train is here for, it’s waiting for the two-fifty-three passenger train to Bridgeboro to come along and pass it.”

“We’re not going to sit down!” Pee-wee shouted. “No matter what, we’re not going to sit down. You do that and then you sprawl on the ground for the rest of the afternoon talking a lot of nonsense and you won’t get up—I know how you do. Then right away you start jollying. That’s a rule, you can’t sit down.”

“You invented it,” Vic said. “I think there’s about twenty or thirty or forty or fifty or sixty or a couple of dozen million cars till you get to the engine and it’s swampy that way too. You can’t even see where the blamed thing ends, I bet it bunks into the ocean.”

I said, “There are only about two thousand cars the other way. If we walked around maybe we’d get to Little Valley by last February. Let’s go around the end of the train because maybe the passenger train will be delayed a few weeks on account of it being the Drearie Railroad.”

So then we all started to walk along toward the end of the train so as to go around because you know how it is with freight trains, they fall asleep.

Wig said, “If you’re about in the middle of a long train, which is the other end?”

“Are you going to start that crazy stuff?” Pee-wee wanted to know.

“It’s not crazy stuff,” I told him. “It’s a very insensible question. One end must be the other end because if it wasn’t there’d only be one end, and if a train only has one end, how is it going to get anywhere—I’ll leave it to Vic. Just the same as if a tree starts growing up in the air down toward its roots, you do it by long division. Where’s the dog? Oh, here he is.”

“Now I know we’re never going to get there,” Pee-wee said.

“I suspected it all the time,” I told him. “We should have started there and then we wouldn’t have had to go; that’s where we made a mistake in geometry. Am I to blame because a freight train forty ’leven miles long gets in the way? If you didn’t eat so much they wouldn’t have to ship all these things from the West.”

“Now I know you’re all going to start being crazy,” the kid shouted.

All of a sudden Wig said, “Here’s a car that’s open on both sides, let’s go through it.”

I guess we had walked about as far as ten cars when he noticed that. The freight car had a big door in the middle and it was wide open, and the one opposite it was wide open too. The car was empty.

“We better be quick about it, then,” Vic said; “safety first.”

Tin-can-tin was the first one across and he didn’t go through the car, he went underneath it, and he stood on the other side barking. I gave Pee-wee a boost up in and then I went after him and just then the train gave a jerk and I could hear a whole lot of cars knocking together, and the door on the other side of our car rolled shut. It just happened to roll shut and I tried to open it. While I was doing that Wig and Vic climbed in the other one and the dog came jumping in after them—a lot he cared about running underneath the cars. So then like a lot of fools we all tried to roll it open instead of getting out again through the other one while there was a chance. In about a few seconds the train was going too fast for us to jump out. Wig wanted to do it but I said no, I wouldn’t take a chance. “I don’t care where I go as long as I don’t go to my death,” I said.

“Now what are we going to do?” Pee-wee said, very fearful like.

I said, “That’s easy, we don’t have to do anything, the train is doing all the work. Maybe if we could get the other door open the train wouldn’t be going so fast on that side and we could get out.”

“That’s a good idea,” Vic said.

“I’m the one that thought of it,” I told him. “But maybe the train is going just as fast on one side as on the other; you never can tell with these freight trains.”

“Are we all here?” Wig asked.

“Sure, dog and all,” I said; “even Pee-wee. I don’t know whether this train is going east or west, but it’s bound to bunk into some ocean or other and stop sometime, that’s one comfort. There’s nothing to worry about, let’s sit down.”

“There’s nothing to sit on,” said Pee-wee.

“Look and see if there isn’t a floor to sit on,” I said; “if there isn’t we’re out of luck.”

Wig began stamping his foot. “Sure there’s a floor,” he said.

“Then we’re all right,” I told him; “our good turn can’t fall through.”

All the while the freight train was rattling along and making an awful lot of noise, and there we were sitting on the floor, it was so hard to stand up, and I started singing and Wig and Vic joined in and all the time Tin-can-tin was jumping around. I guess he thought it was fun getting a free ride, not saying where—he should worry.

This is what we were singing while Pee-wee looked good and worried and was kind of mad like:

I’m glad that this car has a floor,

A lot I don’t care for a door;

If I had to go round without touching the ground,

You bet that I’d be good and sore.

Anyway I told you this story was crazy.