Roy Blakeley's roundabout hike

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?”

“It’s something I invented,” he hollered at me, “and you’re so fresh you nearly knocked it in the lake. Did I say I’d give you a shot?”

“Come on, let’s row over to him,” I said to Dub. “I’d rather jolly him along than catch sunfish.” That’s my favorite outdoor sport, jollying Pee-wee.

So we rowed over just under the springboard and I caught hold of one of his legs so the boat wouldn’t drift. “What is it anyway?” I asked him. “Let’s look at it.”

“It’s a windmeter,” he said.

“A which?” I asked him.

“It’s for telling which way the wind blows,” he said, “and I’m going to see if I can sell a lot of them. Maybe the Boy Scouts of America could use them and maybe they’ll get advertised in Boys’ Life.”

“They don’t care which way the wind blows,” I told him. “Let’s look at it.”

Oh boy, that was some invention. I’m glad Edison never saw it or he’d have died from jealousy. It was a long, thin bottle, maybe about ten inches long; Dub Smedley said a tooth-brush came in it. There were a lot of crinkly strips of confetti all different colors fixed to the cork; the ends of the strips were bound together and fixed to the cork with a pin. It was kind of like a comet only smaller. It was quite a little smaller. The way you did was to stick the cork in the bottle and hold on to the bottle and let the confetti all fly loose. Then, you could tell what way the wind was blowing. You moved it around in your fingers like a compass till the confetti blew straight out and then you knew that the closed up end of the bottle was pointed the way the wind wasn’t blowing. And the other end was pointing the way the wind was blowing. When you wanted to put that wonderful instrument in your pocket you just stuffed the confetti into the bottle and put the cork in that way. There were three or four matches in the bottle and a lightning bug in case the matches wouldn’t work. There was a cricket too and there was a hole in the cork so the wild animals could breathe.

“What’s the cricket for?” I asked the kid.

“Will you let go my leg?” he shouted. “Do you think I’m a mooring buoy or something?”

“What’s the cricket for?” I asked him. All the while Dub Smedley was laughing.

“That shows how much you don’t know about scouting,” Pee-wee said, good and excited. “That’s named the Chipmunk Scout Emergency Kit, and maybe I’m going to get it patented. It’s a combination windmeter and you can drink out of the tube if you’re famishing and you can use it for a compass too, because if you lay a cricket on the ground he’ll always start going south----”