Читать книгу Roy Blakeley's Wild Goose Chase - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Now I’m good and mad and maybe I won’t even go on any more hikes until I take the next one because on account of a lot of trouble I had with scouts wanting to go hiking up at Temple Camp. If the Boy Scouts of America wanted to resign from me right now this minute I wouldn’t stop them. I started a hike so nice and innocent like—you know the way I do—and it turned out to be a couple of dozen parades; gee they must think I’m the Ringling Brothers circus or something. Westy Martin says he should worry because I’m the one that started my patrol. Sure, and I’m going to be the one to finish it too. If it went the way I started it, it would hike to the North Pole and stay there.

Anyway, if any more scouts in the middle west or the middle south or the south end of the east or anywhere else write letters and want to take hikes with me I’ll be happy to send them sticks of dynamite by parcel post. Or the middle north either; I don’t care where they live. I don’t even care if they live at all.

Jiminy crinkems, a joke is a joke but when you dump as much as the whole of starving Russia on one patrol leader, do you call that a joke? Ha, ha, can you see me laugh and look merry like scouts are supposed to do in the Handbook? Smile and look pleasant, that’s what they say. Believe me, I’m smiling so much that I’m growling like a laughing hyena. You can’t go by the picture of me on the books because that was taken just after school closed, it was taken from life. I wish some scouts were taken from life, too.

If you want to read this true story you can, only you do it at your own risk and you won’t get much to eat because the only thing we had a lot of was nothing at all—oh, boy, we had plenty of that.

And another thing too, you needn’t write and ask if I’m really alive because I’m very low and not expected to live—any minute I might die laughing. And if you want to know where I’m going next, I’m not going anywhere and you’re welcome to go to the same place, many thanks, the pleasure is mine.

A lot of fellers write and say they like it when I kid Pee-wee Harris—that’s my favorite outdoor sport. They say they like Pee-wee a lot when he’s all excited. If you like him so much you can take him, you’re welcome to him, and I wish he’d start a patrol in Siberia or Alaska or Mars or somewhere. Some fellers like Pee-wee in his scout suit. I like him in the other end of China. They keep writing me letters and say they like it when Pee-wee and I are together. I wouldn’t mind being with him if we had the Atlantic Ocean between us.

So now I’m going to start, and you needn’t write and say you’d like to join my patrol like you’re all the time doing, because already I’ve got eight too many. None at all is the best number, believe me. Take my advice, if you ever start a patrol don’t have any members in it.

So now this is the beginning, and you’ll know when you get to the end because that’s where I’ll stop. When I got up to Temple Camp with my troop there was a letter waiting for me up there. I guess the feller that sent it thought I didn’t have any home. I’ve got a home but I don’t use it much. All the time I keep getting letters from scouts. Lots of them make believe they’re crazier than I am, on purpose.

Anyway, this one was from a feller that didn’t want to take a hike with me because he was sick. I came running, merrily, merrily, from Administration Shack where they give you the letters and I kept shouting, “Here’s a feller that doesn’t want to go on a hike with me.”

“I don’t blame him,” one of the fellers said.

I said, “He’s been reading my stories about hikes and he’s sick and can’t go out.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him,” Doc Carson said. “Which one did he read?”

“How do I know,” I said. “Maybe it was Robinson Crusoe; I wrote Robinson Crusoe—only I never got any answer from him. Anyway,” I said, “it doesn’t make any difference what one he read, they’re all worse than each other. Pick out any one you want, you can’t go right—the worst one is the best of all. I should worry, we have a lot of fun on them. And besides that,” I told them, “the next one is going to be a special one; I thought of it when I was lying awake in the middle of the afternoon one night. All the hikes I ever went on started at the beginning. This one’s going to start in the middle and go toward both ends.”

“How are you going to get to the middle?” Warde Hollister wanted to know.

I said, “We don’t have to get there, we’re already there, that’s where we start.”

“You better tell Pee-wee Harris about that,” El Sawyer said. “He’ll go mad and we’ll have to shoot him.”

I said, “Listen, do you want to hear this letter from a feller that broke his funny-bone or his collar-bone or something, and can’t go out. He’s the only feller that ever wrote to me that doesn’t want to take a hike. Come on down by the springboard.”