By that time Dub and Sandy were laughing so hard they couldn’t speak. Dub was lying on his back kicking his legs.
I said, “This has gone far enough. We shall find that will, say no more.”
So then we all started for Temple Camp and on the way there we were good and serious about what we were going to do, because I could see we had a chance to do a pretty big stunt. We all said we wouldn’t tell anybody why we were going to camp in Beaver Chasm, so nobody would come there, because in Temple Camp, oh boy, they’re a snoopy bunch. After supper that night I went in Administration Shack and got permission for the four of us to camp in Beaver Chasm for three days—that’s the most you can get permission for unless a scoutmaster goes along. They give you an eats ticket; it’s a requisition slip, that’s what it really is, only we call it an eats ticket. Then you take that to the cooking shack and Chocolate Drop (he’s cook) gives you enough food to last for the time you’re going to be away. But he always gives more than you need. We had to come home late the third day so he gave us enough so we could cook eight meals—coffee and beans and egg powder and Indian meal (I make flapjacks out of that) and canned pineapple and salmon and crackers and, oh gee, all kinds of stuff. Chocolate too. And dandy bacon.
We got a tent from the commissary and four army cots. We could have made hemlock beds, that’s easy, only you can carry things in army cots by carrying them like stretchers. Two of them we carried rolled up and the other two open and full of things. Pee-wee was all dressed up like a Christmas tree or a hardware store or something, with his belt-axe and his aluminum frying-pan and his scout-knife and his compass all hanging from his belt. He didn’t bother about his windmeter. He sounded like a freight train when he walked.
We started out early in the morning—that’s two starts for this story. In most stories you get only one start. But in this story you get two starts and a lot of different endings. This time we didn’t go up through the woods because on account of all the things we had to carry. There’s too much brush in the woods and not even a trail in most places. So we went along the shore of the lake where there’s a path and all the Scouts thought we were going camping around the lake. That was one good thing to throw them off the scent. Then we turned north where the brook is, and you better look at the map. There’s a good path right beside the brook and we followed it till we came to the woods trail, the same way that old Mr. Bagley went home the day he didn’t get there. It was pretty easy walking along that trail to the chasm. So that’s how we got there.
We picked out a peach of a place in the chasm and put up our tent there and built a fireplace out of stones. Oh boy, it was nice where we camped. We put the tent right close to one side of the chasm where the wall was almost straight up and down. We were good and tired so we just sprawled around getting rested till lunch time, and after that we said we’d start hunting. Where the side of the chasm went up there was a kind of a shelf, all rocks, and Pee-wee sat on that. Dub and Sandy and I sat on rocks on the ground. It was so rocky around there that even there was a big flat rock inside the tent, we put the tent up around it and we used the rock for a dining table.
Sandy was feeling kind of silly, I guess we all were, and he said, “Did we put that flat rock in the tent, or didn’t we?”
Dub said, “If we did we can claim to be pretty strong to put a rock the size of that one inside the tent. Most fellows couldn’t even lift it.” Pee-wee almost fell off his royal throne. “That shows the two of you are getting to be as crazy as Roy,” he shouted.
I said, “Silence! Those are harsh words, Scout Harris. What Dub says is perfectly true. It’s an interesting question in natural science—”
“You make me sick with your natural silence, I mean science!” he shouted.