Roy Blakeley's roundabout hike

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

I guess you’re in a hurry for the next day to come, but anyway you’ll have to wait till after we’ve had our lunch because we were good and hungry. Mostly I have eats come between the chapters so as you won’t be interrupted. Oh boy, the things that happen between the chapters are even more than the things that happen in the chapters. Between chapters we have ice cream cones and everything, but they’re not a part of the story.

It was nice and dim down there in the chasm. We couldn’t go down the side, so we went to the end where it sloped down sort of and we went in the way the brook does—I mean the way it comes out. Only then there wasn’t any brook. It was all rocks in the chasm. I guess that chasm is about a half a mile long. Where it’s widest there is grass growing but everywhere else there are rocks. When there’s any water in there it kind of wriggles in and out among the rocks.

Just like I thought, there was water in the Giant’s Basin. That’s a deep pool made by rocks. It was full of killies, just like I knew it would be. Because when the brook dried up the fish would have to go where there was water. They were all crowded in it and we could scoop them up in our hands—jiminies it was easy. We found an old tin dipper that I guess used to be used to drink out of and we hammered it flat with a stone so it was kind of like a frying-pan. Then we started a fire and I fried killies and they were good. Sandy kept cleaning them with his knife while I kept frying them and Dub kept getting wood for the fire. I bet you can guess what Pee-wee was doing—honest that kid could cause a shortage in the Atlantic Ocean. You have to eat a lot of killies but that’s easy.

Afterward I took a long stick and felt around on the bottom of the pool. There were other places like that pool, only not so big. There were lots of crevices between rocks too. All of a sudden I began to think we did stand a pretty good chance of finding that lost will. Because I’ll tell you why. If the dispatch container fell out of the old man’s pocket into the water it would have been carried along and most likely get wedged in somewhere between rocks. Or else it might get into one of those pools. I didn’t bother my head thinking how the wallet or whatever you call it, got out of the old man’s pocket because I believed it fell out before his coat was taken off. And I didn’t worry about how his coat happened to be off, either.

I said, “To tell you the honest truth the only thing that makes me think we won’t find anything is because Pee-wee is mixed up in it. You fellows don’t know because you’ve never been up to camp before, but Pee-wee is the big hero of about three million things that never happened. I’m sorry it wasn’t him that tried to start the world war because then it never would have happened. You see how the wind died down when we started out on a windmeter hike. But if it wasn’t for Pee-wee I’d think we might find that oil-can or oil container or whatever you call it. It looks good to me. Only there’s no use hunting around. We ought to come and camp here a couple of days or so and work spasmodically—”

“You mean systematically!” Pee-wee yelled.

“What difference does it make what I mean?” I shot back at him. “It’s actions that count, not meanings—I’ll leave it to Dub. We’ve got to go to work under deficient leadership—or sufficient or inefficient, I don’t care.”

All of a sudden Pee-wee went up in the air. “Are you going to have some sense or not?” he shouted. “Now we’ve got a chance to find a paper that will fix it so Mr. Bagley can sell all that woods to Temple Camp and every newspaper in the United States will have pictures of us how we found a lost will and maybe I bet even that woods will be named after us even! And all you can do is to keep on fooling about it, you think it’s a joke to not get some property that you ought to get, you’re such a big fool always laughing and talking a lot of nonsensical nonsense! Do you think that’s the way to discover something serious?”

“I don’t want to discover anything serious,” I said.

“That’s because you’re a Silver Fox,” the kid yelled, “and they’re all the same only you’re worse than any of them and they ought to be named the Laughing Hyenas!”