I said, “Let’s go down to the river and look around and decide how we’ll have things down there, in case we can get the car moved. Maybe we can use the shack where we found the inventor, as a kind of a branch headquarters.”
“Can we catch fish down at that river?” the kid wanted to know.
I told him, “Sure, we can catch canned salmon and fishballs and baseballs and everything. When we go down there we’ll let the fish know we’re coming, we’ll drop them a line.”
So then we all started along the tracks down to the river to kind of look around down there and make plans.
I said, “I hope the field is still down there; I hope Mr. Van Schlessenhoff didn’t put it in the market. Anyway, the river won’t be there.”
“What are you talking about?” Pee-wee yelled..
“I’m talking about whether ice cream should be fried or roasted,” I said.
“I admit it,” I told him. “If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Why won’t the river be there?” he began shouting.
“Because it flows past Bridgeboro,” I told him. “Did you ever hear of a river staying in one place? It takes an east-westerly course and flows into New York Bay. You learn that in the third grade.”
“You’re so smart—where does it rise?” he yelled.
I said, “It rises in the morning, that’s more than you do.”
“What do you mean, in the morning?” he fairly yelled.
“In the northwestern part of the morning,” I said. “That’s why a river has a bed. You rise from your bed, don’t you? Posilutely. That shows your ignorance. I suppose you don’t even know that Great Neck is south of Rubber Neck.”
“You’re crazy!” he yelled. “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”
Gee whiz, that’s my favorite outdoor sport, jollying Pee-wee.
Now that afternoon that we followed the tracks down to the river it wasn’t so easy as it was on that Saturday that Mr. Ellsworth went with us, nor on that Sunday that Westy and I followed the old rails down there, tracking the inventor. The reason for that was that it was a couple of months later, and a couple of months make a big difference with cat-tails, because they grow even faster than cats. Now pretty soon you’ll see how the cat-tails turned out to be tales of adventure—you just wait and see.
That Saturday when we first followed the old tracks across the marsh the cat-tails were not so high and we could see, kind of, how the trestle was built underneath the tracks. The tracks were just high enough to be out of the marsh. And the cat-tails were just a little above the tracks. They grow awful thick, cat-tails do. I know all about them, because we pick them and dry them and sell them for punk sticks to drive mosquitoes away. We get a nickel a bunch for them—no war tax.