are rolling up a hundred. We'll bunk right into the back
cover of the book, that's what we'll do." Oh boy, you would laugh if you
heard that fellow talk. He's a big fellow; he's about twenty-five years
old, I guess.

"Believe _me_, I hope the book will have a good strong cover," I told him.

Then Will Dawson (he's the only one of us that has any sense), he said,
"If there are two hundred pages in the book, that means you've got to go
two miles on every page."

"Suppose a fellow should skip," I told him.

"Then that wouldn't be hiking, would it?" he said.

I said, "Maybe I'll write it scout pace."

"I often skip when I read a book, but I never go scout pace," Charlie
Seabury said.

"Well," I told him, "this is a different kind of a book."

"I often heard about how a story runs," Harry Donnelle said, "but I never
heard of one going scout pace."

"You leave it to me," I said, "this story is going to have action."

Then Will Dawson had to start shouting again. Cracky, that fellow's a fiend
on arithmetic. He said, "If there are two hundred pages and thirty lines on
a page, that means we've got to go more than one-sixteenth of a mile for
every line."

"Righto," I told him, "action in every word. The only place a fellow can
get a chance to rest, is at the illustrations."

Dorry Benton said, "I wish you luck."

"The pleasure is mine," I told him.

"Anyway, who ever told you, you could write a book?" he asked me.

"Nobody _had_ to tell me; I admit I can," I said.

"How about a plot?" he began shouting.

"There's going to be a plot forty-eight by a hundred feet," I came back at
him, "with a twenty foot frontage. I should worry about plots."

Harry Donnelle said he guessed maybe it would be better not to have any
plot at all, because a plot would be kind of heavy to carry on a hundred
mile hike.

"Couldn't we carry it in a wheelbarrow?" Will wanted to know.

"We'd look nice," I told him, "hiking through a book with the plot in a
wheelbarrow."

"Yes, and it would get heavier too," Westy Martin said, "because plots
grow thicker all the time."

"Let's not bother with a plot," I said; "there's lots of books without
plots."

"Sure, look at the dictionary," Harry Donnelle said.

"And the telephone book," I told him, "It's popular too; everybody reads
it."

"We should worry about a plot," I said.

By now I guess you can see that we're all crazy in our patrol. Even Harry
Donnelle, he's crazy, and he isn'