That man had a lot of lunch, pickles and bologna and a pail of spaghetti and bread and everything, and there was only one thing that we didn’t like about it, and that was that he had already eaten it about an hour before. So it didn’t do us much good. It only made us hungrier when he told us about it. He said, “Badda luck, hey, Boss? Spagett, ah, what d’you call it, nice. You lika, huh?” Warde said, “We don’t like spaghetti that’s already passed into history.”
“We don’t like history, anyway,” I said. “But have you got any matches?”
The man said, “Hey, sure, boss, plenty de match.”
So he gave us some matches and about half a loaf of shiny looking bread that he had left from his own lunch and then he went along across the bridge. We asked him how business was and he said, “No biz.”
After that we got our fire started and we cooked our fish on the tin that Pee-wee had found and, yum yum, but that lunch tasted good. Maybe if you were ever a starving mariner shipwrecked on a desert island, you’ll know how that lunch tasted.
We were good and tired so we sprawled around in the woods near the creek and jollied each other, especially Pee-wee.
Warde said, “The next time anybody mentions a funny-bone hike to me——”
“What do you know about funny-bone hikes?” Hervey shot back. “You’ve only seen the beginning of one. What we’ve been doing up to now is just a demonstration.”
“Good night, have a heart,” I said.
Hervey just lay there on his back with one leg up in the air, catching that crazy hat of his on his foot and trying to kick it back on his face—honest, that fellow’s a scream. All the while he was singing:
The land is very funny,
??And the water’s very wet,
We’ve been everywhere,
But up in the air;
??And we haven’t done anything yet.
I said, “Sure, maybe if we’re patient we’ll have some mishaps. While there’s life there’s hope.”
“Trust to Hervey,” Bert said.
Pee-wee said, “I could do without the mishaps if I had some more food.”
“When you’re hungry you’re supposed to eat a little at a time,” I told him. “Don’t you know when a man is starving they give him one spoonful of milk to begin with? You have to get used to eating.”
“I’m used to it already,” our young hero shouted.
Warde said, “You’d better look out; did you ever hear about the fish——”
“There isn’t any more fish,” I said.
“He was in a globe,” Warde said, “and the man that owned him took a spoonful of water out of the globe each day until that fish gradually learned to live on dry land.&rdqu............