This story is all about a hike. It starts on Bridge Street and ends on Bridge Street. Maybe you’ll think it’s just a street story. But that’s where you’ll get left. It starts at the soda fountain in Warner’s Drug Store on Bridge Street in Catskill, New York, and it ends at the soda fountain in Bennett’s Candy Store on Bridge Street in Bridgeboro, New Jersey. That’s where I live; not in Bennett’s, but in Bridgeboro. But I’m in Bennett’s a lot.

Believe me, that hike was over a hundred miles long. If you rolled it up in a circle it would go around Black Lake twenty times. Black Lake would be just a spool—good night! In one place it was tied in a bowline knot, but we didn’t count that. It was a good thing Westy Martin knew all about bowline knots or we’d have been lost.

Harry Donnelle said it would be all right for me to say that we hiked all the way, except in one place where we were carried away by the scenery. Gee, that fellow had us laughing all the time. I told him that if the story wasn’t about anything except just a hike, maybe it would be slow, but he said it couldn’t be slow if we went a hundred miles in one book. He said more likely the book would be arrested for speeding. I should worry. “Forty miles are as many as it’s safe to go in one book,” he said, “and here we are rolling up a hundred. We’ll bunk right into the back cover of the book, that’s what we’ll do.” Oh boy, you would laugh if you heard that fellow talk. He’s a big fellow; he’s about twenty-five years old, I guess.

“Believe me, I hope the book will have a good strong cover,” I told him.

Then Will Dawson (he’s the only one of us that has any sense), he said, “If there are two hundred pages in the book, that means you’ve got to go two miles on every page.”

“Suppose a fellow should skip,” I told him.

“Then that wouldn’t be hiking, would it?” he said.

I said, “Maybe I’ll write it scout pace.”

“I often skip when I read a book, but I never go scout pace,” Charlie Seabury said.

“Well,” I told him, “this is a different kind of a book.”

“I often heard about how a story runs,” Harry Donnelle said, “but I never heard of one going scout pace.”

“You leave it to me,” I said, “this story is going to have action.”

Then Will Dawson had to start shouting again. Cracky, that fellow’s a fiend on arithmetic. He said, “If there are two hundred pages and thirty lines on a page, that means we’ve got to go more than one-sixteenth of a mile for every line.”

“Righto,” I told him, “action in every word. The only place a fellow can get a chance to rest, is at the illustrations.”

Dorry Benton said, “I wish you luck.”

“The pleasure is mine,” I told him.

“Anyway, who ever told you, you could write a book?” he asked me.

“Nobody had to tell me; I admit I can,” I said.

“How about a plot?” he began shouting.

“There’s going to be a plot forty-eight by a hundred feet,” I came back at him, “with a twenty foot frontage. I should worry about plots.”

Harry Donnelle said he guessed maybe it would be better not to have any plot at all, because a plot would be kind of heavy to carry on a hundred mile hike.

“Couldn’t we carry it in a wheelbarrow?” Will wanted to know.

“We’d look nice,” I told him, “hiking through a book with the plot in a wheelbarrow.”

“Yes, and it would get heavier too,” Westy Martin said, “because plots grow thicker all the time.”

“Let’s not bother with a plot,” I said; “there’s lots of books without plots.”

“Sure, look at the dictionary,” Harry Donnelle said.

“And the telephone book,” I told him, “It’s popular too; everybody reads it.”

“We should worry about a plot,” I said.

By now I guess you can see that we’re all crazy in our patrol. Even Harry Donnelle, he’s crazy, and he isn’t in our patrol at all. I guess it’s catching, hey? And, oh boy, the worst is yet to come.

So now I guess I’d better begin and tell you how it all happened. The story will unfold itself or unwrap itself or untie itself or whatever you call it. This is going to be the worst story I ever wrote and it’s going to be the best, too. This chapter isn’t a part of the hike, so really the story doesn’t begin till you get to Warner’s Drug Store. You’ll know it by the red sign. This chapter is just about our past lives. When I say, “go” then you’ll know the story has started. And when I finish the pineapple soda in Bennett’s, you’ll know that’s the end. So don’t stop reading till I get to the end of the soda. The story ends way down in the bottom of the glass.

Maybe you don’t know who Harry Donnelle is, so I’ll tell you. He was a lieutenant, but he’s mustered out now. He got a wound on his arm. His hair is kind of red, too. That’s how he got the wound—having red hair. The Germans shot at the fellow with red hair, but one good thing, they didn’t hit him in the head.

He came up to Temple Camp where our troop was staying and paid us a visit and if you want to know why he came, it’s in another story. But, anyway, I’ll tell you this much. Our three patrols went up to camp in his father’s house-boat. His father told us we could use the house-boat for the summer. Those patrols are the Ravens and the Elks and the Solid Silver Foxes. I’m head of the Silver Foxes.

The reason he came to camp was to get something belonging to him that was in one of the lockers of the house-boat. I wrote to him and told him about it being there and so he came up. He liked me and he called me Skeezeks. Most everybody that’s grown up calls me by a nickname. As long as he was there he decided to stay a few days, because he was stuck on Temple Camp. All the fellows were crazy about him. At camp-fire he told us about his adventures in France. He said you can’t get gum drops in France.

Gee, I wouldn’t want to live there.