I said, “I hope the field is still down there; I hope Mr. Van Schlessenhoff didn’t put it in the market. Anyway, the river won’t be there.” “What are you talking about?” Pee-wee yelled.. “I’m talking about whether ice cream should be fried or roasted,” I said. “You’re crazy,” he shouted. “I admit it,” I told him. “If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be talking to you.” “Why won’t the river be there?” he began shouting. “Because it flows past Bridgeboro,” I told him. “Did you ever hear of a river staying in one place? It takes an east-westerly course and flows into New York Bay. You learn that in the third grade.” “You’re so smart—where does it rise?” he yelled. I said, “It rises in the morning, that’s more than you do.” “What do you mean, in the morning?” he fairly yelled. “In the northwestern part of the morning,” I said. “That’s why a river has a bed. You rise from your bed, don’t you? Posilutely. That shows your ignorance. I suppose you don’t even know that Great Neck is south of Rubber Neck.” “You’re crazy!” he yelled. “You think you’re funny, don’t you?” Gee whiz, that’s my favorite outdoor sport, jollying Pee-wee. Now that afternoon that we followed the tracks down to the river it wasn’t so easy as it was on that Saturday that Mr. Ellsworth went with us, nor on that Sunday that Westy and I followed the old rails down there, tracking the inventor. The reason for that was that it was a couple of months later, and a couple of months make a big difference with cat-tails, because they grow even faster than cats. Now pretty soon you’ll see how the cat-tails turned out to be tales of adventure—you just wait and see. That Saturday when we first followed the old tracks across the marsh the cat-tails were not so high and we could see, kind of, how the trestle was built underneath the tracks. The tracks were just high enough to be out of the marsh. And the cat-tails were just a little above the tracks. They grow awful thick, cat-tails do. I know all about them, because we pick them and dry them and sell them for punk sticks to drive mosquitoes away. We get a nickel a bunch for them—no war tax. Now where the old tracks go across the marsh they are on a wooden trestle part way, and the rest of the way the trestle is sort of solid. Some places you can look down and see the marsh underneath and some places it’s solid so you can’t do that. It’s a kind of a ramshackle thing, because it was never used for passengers, but only to haul lumber and stuff that came up the river in scows and barges.