Читать книгу Roy Blakeley's Go-As-You-Please Hike - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 9

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I said, “Excuse me while I faint!”

Doc sat up straight and he said, “What do you mean, you don’t know what happened to them?”

Dub started to laugh and the kid scowled. Then he said, “Is it so funny that I got bounced the same as the rest of you and lost track of the tickets? Gee whiz, it took a couple of years for me to get them together!”

Doc said, “Why didn’t you hold onto them?”

“Didn’t Roy ask me to show them to him?” he wanted to know.

Doc said, “Didn’t you see them go anywhere?”

“All I know is they went out of my hand when we struck that rut,” said the kid.

We looked back and could see that we were more than a block away from it then. “Maybe they landed in the hay,” said Dub.

Very thoughtful like, Pee-wee said, “That’s right, maybe.”

So we began looking for the tickets. It was just like hunting for a needle in a haystack—we didn’t find them. And by that time we couldn’t see the rut in the road any more. Then the truck stopped.

“All out!” the driver called. Then he stood up and looked over the top of the hay and laughed. “Sorry I can’t take you all the way but I’m in a hurry. Anyway, it’s not far for a bunch of scouts. S’long!”

Pee-wee was all set to tell his troubles to the driver but the engine started and the truck began to move so we all jumped off quick. Soon it was out of sight.

Pee-wee stood staring down the road for a second. Then he said, “What’ll we do next?”

I said, “We always leave that to you, kid. Just now we’re pleased to go without the tickets. You fixed it so we can’t do anything else.”

“And we’re dished out of a free banana split,” said Doc, very sad like.

I said, “Yes, it’s bad enough to be dished out of one dish but when there are four dishes that we’re dished out of it’s a very sad affair.”

“You fellers make me sick,” the kid said disgustedly. “You’d think you couldn’t buy a banana split if you wanted one. Can I help it because....”

“Why should we buy one when we can get it free from you?” I said. “Another thing we don’t know where a go-as-we-please hike may lead us to—especially with you along. We may have railroad fare to pay before we get back to camp tonight. You never can tell. Another thing we have to have money to eat because if we depended on your promises we’d starve to death.”

Gee, he was wild. He said, “Do you mean to say I’m stingy?”

I said, “Far be it from such. You have a heart like an elephant or is it a rhinoceros? Anyhow, it’s some wild animal whose heart is half the size of a human heart. Even arithmetic proves that less and less leaves nothing.”

He said, “I’m too hungry to get mad at your nonsense. We’ll eat as soon as we get to Catskill, hah?”

“Did you ever do anything else as soon as you get to Catskill?” Doc wanted to know.

He said, “Sure. I buy postcards there too, don’t I?”

I said, “Yes, while you’re eating ice cream cones.”

That kid doesn’t believe in three meals a day. He eats the whole day and three meals besides. And when he goes to bed he puts rock candy in his mouth so it will last all night.

It came to us all of a sudden that something was queer about the road that the driver directed us to. It ran west. So I said, “Since when did we hike west to Catskill? Have we been going east all the time?”

Doc said, “Gosh, it didn’t seem so to me. We were talking so much though, I just don’t remember.”

Pee-wee said, “We must have been going east all right because I can see the letter C on the signboard over there.”

So he walked over to it and began reading. I noticed that every once in a while he looked back to us in a funny way as if he was puzzled.

“What’s wrong now, kid?” I asked him.

He said, “I don’t know. There’s something funny about this whole business!”

“Again!” I said.

“It doesn’t say anything about Catskill on this sign,” he said, kind of quietly.

We started to walk over and Doc said, “What does it say, then?”

“It says, WELCOME TO CORNVILLE, ¼ mile from here,” said the kid.