Читать книгу Roy Blakeley's Elastic Hike - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 10

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After a while we came to the stream. I guess we were hiking about two hours before we came to it. That was because we took our time. We should worry. Once we found a patch of mushrooms and Pee-wee wanted to start a fire and cook some in his trusty scout frying pan. Jiminies, I had to pull him away from them. He wanted to start a fire without a match, you know, by rubbing sticks or something or other.

I said, “No, thanks, I have to be home by Christmas. If you want to get a light that way you have to start back in about the tenth century.” Oh, boy, but that stream was running fast! It was good and wide too.

Warde said, “It’s the spring freshets all right.” I said to him, “I never knew they’d get as fresh as that. This looks more like the Mississippi River. We’re all going to have some job getting across here.”

When you get near that stream the road all kind of fizzles out so there isn’t any; I guess no wagons ever go that far. Autos don’t go on that road at all, anyway I never saw any. Most always when we had gone there it was in the winter or late in the summer after we got home from Temple Camp. So I guess that’s why we had never seen the stream so wide, and rushing like mad. The logs that Westy and I had fixed across the water were gone.

Pee-wee said, “Now what are we going to do?”

“Do you blame me?” I asked him.

“It’s a regular flood,” Warde said.

I threw a stick in and it went sailing away. Jiminies, in about three seconds we couldn’t see it at all.

Warde said, “Do you notice how wet the water is? I wonder if it’s always like that.”

Then up piped Scout Harris. He said, “This would be a good place to eat as long as we can’t go any further.”

“Who says we can’t go any further?” Dinkey wanted to know. “It’s for me to think up a way.”

“Sure, we should worry,” I said. “Warde and I have been across already; and all the other scouts in my patrol have, too. Now you’ve got to think of a way to get across, then we’ll go in advance of you, following leisurely, merrily, merrily.”

“There you go with your merrily, merrily again,” the kid shouted. “You learned that from that crazy Fuller Bullson that you met last summer. How are we going to get across with the water like this, that’s what I want to know?”

“Ask Dinkey,” I said. “I don’t have to get to be a Silver Fox, I’m one already.”

“I’m glad I’m not one,” Pee-wee said.

“The pleasure is mine,” I told him.

Warde said to Dinkey, “You’d better not try to swim it, the water’s rushing too fast, and besides you’d only have to hang around and dry your clothes.”

“They’re old clothes,” Dinkey said.

“Yes, but just the same I wouldn’t try that,” Warde said. “But suit yourself, whatever you do we’ll follow.”

Dinkey stood there looking all around and at the water and everything, trying to think how he’d get across. Warde and Pee-wee and I sat on an old log watching him. Warde pushed Pee-wee over backwards and said:

“Three little boy scouts don’t know what to do,

One fell over backwards, then there were two.”

All the while Dinkey kept looking around and thinking. I saw that fellow was going to be a good scout because you couldn’t stump him. “It’s as hard for you as it is for me this time,” he said, kind of laughing.

“Don’t you worry about us,” I said. “There’s the stream, now it’s up to you.”

“You got to have resources,” Pee-wee shouted at him.

Getting across that water was always easy before, I’ll say that. When Hunt Manners got into the Silver Foxes he just poled across on a kind of a raft that was a part of the old bridge. When Dorry Benton did he wore his bathing suit under his other clothes and he put his clothes in an oilskin bag and carried it while he was swimming. Will Dawson had the easiest time of all, because the water was so shallow then that he just waded across.

But, oh, boy, now it was a regular torrent. That’s why you don’t ever want to join the Silver Foxes in the spring. It’s best to join in the winter when there’s only a little water, and when maybe even it’s frozen too. But anyway you’d better not join at all, that’s the safest way, because we’re all a lot of nuts and besides there isn’t any more room in my patrol so you couldn’t get in anyway even if you wanted to. The pleasure is yours and many of them, because on account of the things we do. But I’ll say this much, you might better be in the Silver Foxes than in the Chipmunks or the raving Ravens or the Elks. We’re the same as other patrols only different.

Dinkey said, “Well, it’s got to be did; I wouldn’t start anything that I couldn’t finish.”

“Oh, it’s all the same to us,” I said.

“Only hurry up and think because I’m hungry,” the head Chipmunk piped up.

Dinkey said, “I’ll make it somehow or other.” I said, “It’s all the same to us, we’re having a good rest, we don’t mind sitting here.

“Three little boy scouts, they’re not in a hurry,

They don’t have to think up anything, they should worry.”

Pee-wee said, “Do you call that poetry? There are too many words to it.”

“There are too many words to you, too,” I said. “Why should I be so stingy with words?” So then we all just kept sitting on the log making up crazy rimes and watching Dinkey.

I said, “Take your time and think carefully before acting.”

The kid said, “I wouldn’t go to such trouble to get into an insane asylum.”

“You could get into one without any trouble at all,” Warde told him.

“It’s a very small matter,” I said.

“What is?” the kid yelled.

“You are,” I said; “no sooner said than stung. You’re so small you wouldn’t even take a tall chance—leave it to Dinkey.”

Dinkey said, “I don’t have to cross right here, do I? Would it be all right to cross upstream a ways if I found a good place?”

I said, “All you have to do is get on the other side.”

“Which is the other side?” Warde wanted to know. “It’s the same as a scout staff; which is the other end of it?”

I said, “That’s easy, the other side is the one that’s opposite the side that’s across the way from it. But you have to find one side before you can tell which is the other. Then you multiply by the pronoun. It’s the same as how many onions are there?”

“Where?” Pee-wee screamed at me. “Anywhere,” I said. “What difference does it make to me? Come on, follow your leader.” I said that because Dinkey had started along the bank of the brook, kind of studying it. And we all followed in a row, first me—I mean I—then Warde, then Pee-wee. All the while I was singing:

“It’s hard to get over because the stream rose,

So follow young Dinkey wherever he goes.”