I guess the railroad men weren’t going to take any more chances with
that car. Anyway, they put it on a track and then Mr. Corber—he’s
section superintendent—he asked us what we wanted to do about the car.
He asked us where we wanted it put. Believe me, that wasn’t an easy
question to answer, because you can’t put a railroad car anywhere you
want to put it. A railroad car is like a scout, because it can follow a
track, but if there aren’t any tracks how is it going to get anywhere?
But one thing, you can bet we didn’t want to have our scout meeting
place down right next to the railroad station, because scouts are
supposed to study nature and a lot of fun we’d have studying commuters.
Pee-wee said, “The station is all right; I vote to leave the car right
where it is.”
“That’s because it’s near Bennett’s,” I told him, because he usually
parks all through vacation at Bennett’s Confectionery. He’s the one that
put the scream in ice cream. Harry Donnelle endowed a stool in Bennett’s
just for Pee-wee—it’s kind of like a bed in a hospital or a
scholarship, or something or other like that.
The rest of the fellows said, “No, siree, the river for us! We want it
moved down near the river! Let’s move it to Van Schlessenhoff’s field!”
Now comes the geography part; it’s about Bridgeboro and that field. Mr.
Van Schlessenhoff had a lot of land but he cut it all up. It’s a wonder
he didn’t cut his name up, too, hey? He could have got a whole lot of
nice little names out of it. Once he owned most all of Bridgeboro, that
man did. He owned nearly the whole alphabet, too. Jimmy, he takes up
nearly the whole telephone book, that’s what Connie Bennett says.
Years and years and years and years and years and years ago—even before
I was born—that man’s father had a sawmill down by the river. He never
said anything but just sawed wood. When he died he was awful poor. He
didn’t leave anything to his son but his name, that’s what my father
said. Gee whiz, that was enough.
Anyway, Mr. Van Schlessenhoff is a mighty nice man. He owns some lots
and things, and he wouldn’t sell one of his fields for the town to build
a school on. So you can see from that what a nice man he is.
He owned that field down by the river that we were talking about. There
is an old railroad track from that field right up to the Bridgeboro
station, so they could send lumber away. It’s all old and rusty and
broken in lots of places, and the piles are all kind of rotten where it
goes across Cat-tail Marsh. Up in town it’s all buried in the dirt, sort
of, but you can see the old rails good and plain where they go across
Main Street. You can find those rails where they go across Willow Place,
too, and they run right under Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop and across the
yards in back. You can pick out those rusty old rails underneath the
long grass all the way across the Sneezenbunker land and almost right up
to the station. One Saturday we picked them out all the way, just for
fun. I guess there wasn’t much to Bridgeboro when those tracks were
used.
So that’s all there is about history and geography in this story. The
rest of it is all adventure. That’s my favorite study—adventure.
That same night that we got back from our wild ride we decided to go and
see Mr. Van Schlessenhoff and ask him if he’d be willing for us to move
our car down to his field by the river, and have it there for a meeting
place.
He was awful nice. He said he’d be glad to do it because he liked the
boy scouts, but that there was one reason why he couldn’t. He said that
reason was because he was going to put that field in the market.
Then, all of a sudden, up spoke our young hero, Hon. Pee-wee Harris, and
he said, “You take my advice, Mr. Van Schlessenhoff, and don’t put that
field in the market. You leave it where it is, right down there by the
river; that’s a dandy place.”
Mr. Van Schlessenhoff laughed so hard that he said he guessed it would
be all right for us to go ahead if we could navigate the car, because
maybe he would leave that field right there and not put it in the market
after all.
So you can see how all this crazy stuff was started by Pee-wee. He set
the ball rolling—I mean the car. And oh, boy——