Pee-wee said, “You’ll live to regret it with all your fooling and wasting time here like this.” He was thinking about not having time for ice cream.
After we had a good rest I grabbed the apple that Pee-wee was eating and I threw it at the word STOP and the thing turned around to the word GO. “That shows you how much resourcefulness a Silver Fox has,” I told them. “If I hadn’t thought about that we might have sat here till next Sunday. That was my idea.”
“It was my apple!” Pee-wee shouted.
“Follow your leader,” I said.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE DISTANT WHISTLE
So now you know the way we hike. Sometimes even it’s worse than that. Tom Slade (he’s camp assistant) says it’s best to have a destination when you start. But if you have a destination when you start, what’s the use of going anywhere? What’s the use of going to a destination if you’ve got one already? I should worry about the Handbook. But anyway you needn’t write to me to ask if you can go on one of my special crazy hikes next summer because already nine Scouts want to go. Even now I could tell you what kind of a one it’s going to be, only I won’t. You just wait.
We got to Catskill half an hour before it was time for the train and we went to the Polar Ice Cream Parlor and had ice cream. I treated them to regular fifteen cent plates of ice cream, not cones. It says in there Get a Polar cone. It’s a bear. Believe me, the fifteen cent plates are elephants. That ice cream place is a branch of Temple Camp.
While we were in there Will Dawson was kind of funny acting—he didn’t say much. I thought maybe he was feeling mean because nobody knew how Dub had saved his life. Will and Dub and I were the only ones that knew anything about it. Nobody knew anything about Will taking the boat that night. Once while we were eating Will went over and spoke to the man that keeps the place.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him when he came back.
He said, “Nothing, I was just asking about the train.”