Harry Donnelle said it would be all right for me to say that we hiked all the way, except in one place where we were carried away by the scenery. Gee, that fellow had us laughing all the time. I told him that if the story wasn’t about anything except just a hike, maybe it would be slow, but he said it couldn’t be slow if we went a hundred miles in one book. He said more likely the book would be arrested for speeding. I should worry. “Forty miles are as many as it’s safe to go in one book,” he said, “and here we 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.”
“Anyway, who ever told you, you could write a book?” he asked me.
“Nobody _had_ to tell me; I admit I can,” I said.
“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.