I said, “Do you think a big enterprise like a hike can be started without due thought and consideration—and you needn’t tell me I got those words out of a book, because I know I did. Do you think Christopher Columbus started out to discover Columbus, Ohio, without making all plans and everything? I don’t know what kind of a hike it’s going to be yet. I’ll probably decide yesterday afternoon. And then I’ll pick out who’s going to go on it. I want four fellows and they’ve all got to be crazy.”
“They’ll be good and hungry before they get back,” said Pee-wee.
“That’s nothing, you’re good and hungry before you start out,” I told him. “You never get hungry, because you’re already that way.” Gee whiz, a meal a minute is that kid’s speed. The reason he never boils his vegetables is he’s afraid they’ll shrink. One night he stayed awake three hours trying to figure out how he could eat more than one meal at a time and after a while he woke up and found his mouth open, so he had to get up and shut it. This isn’t so much of a chapter, anyway I should worry, maybe the next one will be even still worse.
CHAPTER II
KERFLOP
Now I’m going to start writing the next chapter and I’m going to keep writing it till the dinner gong rings, so you can see it’s going to have a good ending. It has a good ending even before it starts. It ends in a rice pudding, but oh boy, wait till you see what the last one ends in. I bet you think I’m a crazy author, hey? Anyway, I have a lot of fun.
So now I guess I’ll tell you how my celebrated, world renowned, crazy hikes started. First we got carried away in a railroad car and that was a dandy hike only it wasn’t a hike at all, but it was like one only different. Then four of us had a bee-line hike and went straight to a place on account of a solemn vow that we wouldn’t turn right or left. Then, the next one was a funny-bone hike dedicated to an insane asylum and the next time I go on one like that, I’ll know it—follow your leader, that was it; oh boy! Then we had a tangled trail hike where we had to keep turning to the left no matter what—some mixup! We went home by the way of the Cape of Good Hopeless. Then, we had an elastic hike, because it stretched way out. Most of the fellows that read about our hikes like them—no wonder, because they don’t have to go on them.
Anyway, that night up at Temple Camp I didn’t think any more about a new kind of a hike, because I couldn’t think of a way to have a table d’hote hike, having all the different kinds of hikes kind of separated together. But anyway, I thought up a good name for that kind of a hike, I’d call it the symposium hike, it’s taken from the word simp and it means a lot of different things together.
Early the next morning, as soon as anybody could see the bulletin-board, Scouts started coming up to my patrol cabin to join the hike—jiminies, you’d think I was the Pilgrim Fathers starting out. I told them there wouldn’t be any hike till I thought of a good one. “Do you think I haven’t got my vast public to think about?” I told them. “Boy scouts all over the country who are always writing letters to find out if I’m real or just imitation. And anyway,” I said, “I’m not going to take the whole of Temple Camp with me—only just four fellows.”
That same morning I got an idea and I’m sorry now that I got it. I was just going out on the lake with Dub Smedley—he comes from Jersey City, I don’t blame him. We were going to catch some sunfish. All of a sudden I saw Pee-wee sitting way out on the end of the springboard dangling his legs. He belongs in my troop (I guess you know that) only up at Temple Camp, I don’t see much of him, lucky for that, I’m not kicking. He hangs around the cook shack most of the time. Me, I’m out for life, liberty and the pursuit of snappiness. You follow me and you’ll have some fun, don’t worry, especially in this story that’s every word true. Even the ink I’m writing with is true blue or true too or too true. I’m even greater than George Washington, because he couldn’t tell a lie and and I can only I won’t. And besides, I’d rather be myself than George Washington, because he’s dead—anyway, we were going out to fish for sunfish when I happened to see Pee-wee. I was eating an apple and I threw the core at him and that’s the end of this paragraph, just where he starts to yell. Gee whiz, you’d think it was the end of the world.
“One strike out,” I shouted at him. “What’s that you’ve got in your hand?”