Roy Blakeley's Funny-bone HikeFitzhugh, Percy Keese
General
Roy Blakeley's Funny-bone Hike
Fitzhugh, Percy Keese
Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camping -- Juvenile fiction
Now I don’t know whether Hervey knew where he was going or not. That
fellow knows all the country for miles around Temple Camp. He made
believe he was lost. He says no matter where you are you can’t really
get lost because you’re some place and if you just keep going you’ll
come to some place else and he says anyway one place is as good as
another. So even if you’re home maybe you’re lost.
Anyway he kept going along that country road that branched off from the
turnpike. It was uphill and pretty soon we came to Old Corners only
there wasn’t anything left of it except an old church. I guess the rest
of the village must have rolled down the hill and started up in another
place.
Gee whiz, I like it up there on the hill but you never can tell what a
village will do when it gets started. I was just going to say that maybe
it was on a funny-bone hike only I happened to remember about keeping
still. It was nice and quiet up on that hill—no wonder.
Up there were three or four old houses with nobody living in them and
they were falling to pieces. The church was ramshackle, I guess it was
good and old. There was grass growing between the wooden steps and there
was moss all around on the stone step. All the windows were broken and
there was a great big spider-web across one window. There were old
shingles on the ground too, that had blown off the roof. There were
initials cut in the railing of the steps. There was an old ladder
standing up against the steeple.
“L-l-l——” Pee-wee started to say, and just caught himself in time.
Hervey walked straight for the ladder and up he went, with the rest of
us after him. The steeple wasn’t so high but it was pretty high. The
ladder stood against a little window maybe halfway up. Hervey crawled in
through the window and so did the rest of us. He kept looking back
holding his finger to his mouth; he looked awful funny.
In there was a kind of a little gallery around the edge and you could
look down in through the middle. It smelled like dried wood in there; it
smelled kind of like an attic. It was terribly hot. I saw something
hanging that I thought was an old dried rag and when I grabbed it,
_swhh_, just like that it gave me a start, and I let go pretty quick
because it was a bat. We threw it out through the opening. There were a
couple more there but we didn’t bother them. They looked just like rags
that had been hung up wet and got dry hanging there—stiff like.
[Illustration: “I LET GO PRETTY QUICK BECAUSE IT WAS A BAT.”]
None of us said anything but just did what Hervey did as near as we
could in a little, cramped place like that. We didn’t lean on that old
wooden railing around the gallery—safety first. Down through that open
space hung a rope; it went almost to the bottom. There was a floor down
there; I guessed it was the vestibule of the old church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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