After a little while the fellows came back with our stuff and we put up
our tent between a couple of trees in Mr. Hasbrook’s orchard. He said we
could camp in the house if we wanted, but how can anybody camp in a
house, I’d like to know? You might as well talk about going swimming in
a bath tub. No siree, the orchard for us. Mr. Hasbrook said we could eat
all the apples we wanted to, but we didn’t eat many. I ate five—that
isn’t very many.
We gathered some sticks and started a camp-fire and I made coffee and
flapjacks and scrambled eggs with egg powder. Mr. Hasbrook’s daughter
brought us out some pie and _um_, _um_, wasn’t it good! Oh boy, it was
nice sprawling around there. But anyway, we turned in early—one o’clock
in the morning is early. You couldn’t turn in much earlier or it would
be the night before. I guess we wouldn’t have turned in then, except
that Dorry had to roll out at about six, so as to catch the train down
to Kingston.
Harry Donnelle said, “I suppose Mr. Rinaldo Costello will send a
mammoth, astounding, bewildering, astonishing, amazing, stupifying,
extraordinary, remarkable, dazzling, baffling, cavalcade after Marshal
Foch, as soon as he gets our staggering, unbelievable, incredible
letter.”
We were all of us just sprawling around the fire and Harry was sitting
on a little three legged milking stool and kind of guying Costello’s
mammoth show, in that funny way he had, and saying that Mr. Costello
would probably say I was a matchless, intrepid, dauntless, fearless hero
and adventurer, when all of a sudden that word adventurer put a thought
into my head.
I said, “When it comes to being a dauntless, fearless adventurer, I
guess nobody has anything on you, that’s one thing sure.”
“Oh, I’ve had a few games of basketball,” he said.
“I bet you’ve been to lots of places,” I told him.
He said, “Well, I’ve attended one or two pink teas and strawberry
festivals. Once I was usher at a concert in an Old Ladies’ Home. The
wildest time I ever had was umpiring a game of checkers.”
“You didn’t win that Distinguished Service Cross umpiring a game of
checkers,” Westy said.
“No, I won that playing hide and seek with Fritzie in No Man’s Land,” he
said. “Chuck a little more wood on the fire, Roy.”
I said, “There’s one thing you never told me about, and you promised to
tell it, too. It’s an adventure, but it’s a kind of a mystery, too.”
“Well,” he said, “adventures aren’t so much, but I’ll have to make an
extra charge for mysteries. The high cost of mysteries is something
terrible. I don’t know what the mystery may be, but if you’ll go in the
house and get my cigarette case out of the pocket of my coat that’s
hanging in the sitting room, I’ll let you have any mystery I happen to
have in stock at the wholesale price.”
Oh bibbie, didn’t I scoot in after that cigarette case. He was always
smoking cigarettes, that fellow. He told us never to do it, but he was
always doing it himself. He said he was too old to reform.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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