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
“I can see the pavilion!” he shouted. “I can see the lake! Hey, mister,
come back with the ladder!”
“I guess you’re right,” Hervey said; “that’s the camp, all right.”
“I discovered it! I discovered it!” Pee-wee yelled. “Hey, mister, come
back with that ladder! I can see Temple Camp! Come back!”
But it wasn’t any use; the man was too far away and the breeze was the
other way, and there we were and we couldn’t do anything.
“Why didn’t you shout sooner?” Pee-wee wanted to know, all excited.
“You were the one to discover the camp,” Hervey said.
“Why didn’t you shout as soon as you saw the man?” he shot back.
“Because I made a solemn vow,” Hervey said.
“Now we’re up against it,” the kid said.
“We’re _up_, all right,” said Warde. “Nobody can deny that.”
“How are we going to get down?” Pee-wee wanted to know. “That’s what you
get for making solemn vows. Solemny vows are all right but they don’t
get you any supper. I can see the smoke going up from the cooking shack.
Do you see it? Away, way off there?”
I could see it all right, and oh boy, it looked good. I could see just a
little dab of blue, all sparkling, and I knew it was Black Lake. I could
see a speck of brown and I knew it was the pavilion. It looked as if it
might be about ten miles off. All around, no matter which way we looked,
were woods and mountains.
“Some panorama,” Warde said.
“You can’t eat panoramas,” the kid shouted.
“Sure you can,” I told him. “Didn’t you ever eat an orama? They fry them
in pans; that’s why they call them panoramas; they’re fine.”
“Yes, and we’ll be marooned here all night too,” he piped up. “There
isn’t anybody for miles around. A lot of good the view is going to do
us. This is the loneliest place I ever saw, I bet it’s haunted. I bet
that’s why everybody moved away.”
Bert said, “I don’t believe any ghosts would stay here, it’s too lonely.
Besides, where would they buy their groceries?”
“Ghosts don’t eat,” the kid said.
“I hope you’ll never be a ghost then,” I told him.
“We’re lucky,” Hervey said. “You ought to thank me for bringing you up
here. We can see just where Temple Camp is. We don’t have to depend on
sign posts that change their minds and turntables that send us back to
where we came from or anything. We can see Temple Camp with our own
eyes. Now we know which way to go.”
“Only we can’t go there,” I said.
He said, “That doesn’t make any difference.”
“Sure it doesn’t,” I said. “As long as we know where camp is we’re not
lost any more. We know where we’re at. And when we get to a place where
we know where we’re at it’s a good place to stay. Deny it if you dare.
I’d rather be up here and see the camp and not be able to get there than
to be able to get there if we knew where it was but not to know where it
was.”
“Do you call that logic?” Pee-wee yelled. “It makes it all the worse to
see it.”
“Well, look the other way then,” I told him.
“There’s only one place we haven’t been to so far and that’s under the
ocean,” he said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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