ROY BLAKELEY’S ROUNDABOUT HIKE
ROY BLAKELEY’S ROUNDABOUT HIKE
CHAPTER I
HERE WE ARE
Every time I start telling you about one of our hikes, I say it’s the craziest hike I ever took. I guess it’s true, because they’re all crazier than each other. If there are a lot of things and each one of them is crazier than the other, that shows they’re all the craziest. If you don’t believe it, you can do it by long division only I like short division better—the shorter it is the better I like it. Even if there wasn’t any arithmetic at all I’d be satisfied.
But there’s one good thing about ancient history and that is we don’t study it in my grade. Next term I get civilized government and French pastry or history or something or other—I’m going to get a bicycle too. Then I’m going to have a bicycle trip and write about it.
So now I’m going to tell you about our latest hike—it’s a nineteen twenty-six model only it hasn’t got four wheel brakes. It hasn’t got any brakes at all—we just kept on going and going and going. The noise you hear will be Pee-wee Harris; when he talks, he’s always trying to get distance. Don’t blame me, I couldn’t get rid of him.
I’ll tell you how it was. When we got to Temple Camp, I said I was going to start a new up-to-date hike with all improvements. I said it was going to be so crazy that all the other hikes would have a lot of sense compared to it. Even I wrote a proclamation and tacked it up on the bulletin-board outside of Administration Shack, calling for volunteers absolutely positively for not more than one day’s service—maybe two days. It said that any one who was interested should call on Roy Blakeley at Silver Fox Cabin and that if I wasn’t there they should hunt around for me. Because most always if I’m not in one place, I’m in another. I’m sure to be somewhere. It said if they were interested they were lucky.
Of course, the first one to come up was Pee-wee Harris. He didn’t have far to come, because his patrol bunks in the next cabin to ours. He’s the head chip of the Chipmunks. He’s the one that had the law of supply and demand passed, especially demand. He’s a nice little scout, only he hasn’t got a voice to fit his size. His voice is a large thirty-six—it was made for a couple of giants. If there was a volcano going you couldn’t even hear it on account of Pee-wee.