Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris F. O. B. Bridgeboro - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 8

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As far as it is possible to reduce Pee-wee’s ideas to a common denominator, they comprehended a scheme somewhat as follows. I hesitate to ask the reader to study a map in vacation time, but road maps are not so bad, and if you will glance at the crude one which I have included here, you will see that the Hudson River formed a sort of backbone to Pee-wee’s pilgrimage and colossal enterprise. The Hudson River rises somewhere or other, pursues a southerly course, and empties into the Hudson Terminal, whence it derives its name.

From the neighborhood of Bridgeboro there is a state road which runs up through Tuxedo, Newburgh, Kingston, Saugerties, Catskill and points north. It goes so far that it runs out of our story altogether, and it is a very good road except for motorcycle cops who lurk in the bordering woods. It does not run directly north from Bridgeboro but (as you may see) makes a rather sweeping curve between Bridgeboro and Newburgh. From that point north it runs pretty straight along the river. The bee-line way to go from Bridgeboro as far as Newburgh would be up through Westwood, Nanuet, West Haverstraw, and Fort Montgomery. From this latter point the hiker might (only scouts prefer not to) follow the state road all the way up to Catskill.

Now it was these towns somewhat east of the state road in its lower section that Pee-wee picked out as the points of his famous relay race. He did not intend to be autocratic in this matter and when the letter to himself was once out of his own hands, the hikers might go as they pleased so far as he was concerned. The one requirement was that each relay hiker should move northward to a town or village where it was known that scouts could be found.

Pee-wee’s own responsibility would end at Westwood, which he now set out to invade, and where he intended to let loose his contagious enthusiasm. Then he would return to Bridgeboro and, on the morrow, set forth in the flivver for Temple Camp, where he would live in austere retirement awaiting the lone, unknown hiker who would be his guest and friend.

But before we accompany Pee-wee to his own chosen terminal we must pause to scan the letter which he prepared for eventual delivery to himself:

With this official passport into the golden realm of Temple Camp, safely deposited in his trouser pocket, his scout handbook as a kind of high legal authority stuck in his back pocket, and the road map stuck in his belt, Pee-wee sallied forth from Bridgeboro eating an apple.

The last that was seen of him by any inhabitant of Bridgeboro was when a jitney driver saw him hurl the apple core at a willow tree along the road on the northern outskirts of Bridgeboro. He was then going about three miles an hour, scout pace. The jitney driver saw him take another apple out of his pocket. The weather was clear and warm, the wind north by east.