Then my heart almost jumped into my mouth when I heard voices downstairs and one of them was Barry Boyland’s laughing voice. He and Pop were talking, and saying they were glad to see each other. I stopped in my tracks, and listened for all I was worth, and this is what I heard, “Well, Barry, we _have_ to do something for him--he’s getting the hayfever so badly. Maybe the North would be good for him.”
And then Barry laughed the queerest sounding laugh I’d heard in a long time and said, “Sure, I understand. It’s the same story wherever I go--the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang are all sneezing pretty bad, all except Dragonfly, who is better this year than last--but his parents said he could go, too.” Then Pop and Barry laughed long and loud at each other like it was funny or something. But I didn’t care at all. I was so tickled inside.
Right away a terrible scream of happiness jumped up into my throat, and if I hadn’t stopped it, I’d have yelled even worse than I do when I’m yelling for our baseball team.... Oh boy, oh boy--another trip up North this summer, with all the gang going along!
As I’ve already told you, when we were going to get to go North, we didn’t have any idea we’d run into such an exciting and dangerous mystery, but when a gang of boys get together on a camping trip in the wild North, something is pretty nearly always bound to happen, which it did.
On the way we went through a city which advertised itself as the Capital of the Paul Bunyan Playground--Paul Bunyan being what is called a mythical lumberman of the North, and was supposed to have been terribly big like a giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which is a fairy story every boy ought to know--only instead of Paul Bunyan being a _bad_ giant, he was a good one, and was always doing kind things for people.
We stopped to get some gas for Barry Boyland’s station wagon--which is what we were all riding in--right across from a tourist camp called “Green Gables,” and Little Jim gasped and said, “LOOK! Who and what _is_ that?”
I looked out at what Little Jim was looking at, and saw what he saw, and it was a great statue of a man with a beard and mustache, standing with one hand upraised and the other on a back of a statue of a great big extra big blue cow which had horns. Poetry spoke up and said, “That’s Paul and Babe.”