After a little while the fellows came back with our stuff and we put up our tent between a couple of trees in Mr. Hasbrook’s orchard. He said we could camp in the house if we wanted, but how can anybody camp in a house, I’d like to know? You might as well talk about going swimming in a bath tub. No siree, the orchard for us. Mr. Hasbrook said we could eat all the apples we wanted to, but we didn’t eat many. I ate five—that isn’t very many.
We gathered some sticks and started a camp-fire and I made coffee and flapjacks and scrambled eggs with egg powder. Mr. Hasbrook’s daughter brought us out some pie and _um_, _um_, wasn’t it good! Oh boy, it was nice sprawling around there. But anyway, we turned in early—one o’clock in the morning is early. You couldn’t turn in much earlier or it would be the night before. I guess we wouldn’t have turned in then, except that Dorry had to roll out at about six, so as to catch the train down to Kingston.
Harry Donnelle said, “I suppose Mr. Rinaldo Costello will send a mammoth, astounding, bewildering, astonishing, amazing, stupifying, extraordinary, remarkable, dazzling, baffling, cavalcade after Marshal Foch, as soon as he gets our staggering, unbelievable, incredible letter.”
We were all of us just sprawling around the fire and Harry was sitting on a little three legged milking stool and kind of guying Costello’s mammoth show, in that funny way he had, and saying that Mr. Costello would probably say I was a matchless, intrepid, dauntless, fearless hero and adventurer, when all of a sudden that word adventurer put a thought into my head.
I said, “When it comes to being a dauntless, fearless adventurer, I guess nobody has anything on you, that’s one thing sure.”
“Oh, I’ve had a few games of basketball,” he said.
“I bet you’ve been to lots of places,” I told him.
He said, “Well, I’ve attended one or two pink teas and strawberry festivals. Once I was usher at a concert in an Old Ladies’ Home. The wildest time I ever had was umpiring a game of checkers.”
“You didn’t win that Distinguished Service Cross umpiring a game of checkers,” Westy said.
“No, I won that playing hide and seek with Fritzie in No Man’s Land,” he said. “Chuck a little more wood on the fire, Roy.”