We got together to read, the first time, on a warm night during Sophomore Summer, on the Norwich, Vermont, side of the river. Big Bob brought the book—got it out of the library, just like practically every book he’s ever read. He’d probably been blowing off some required reading, checking out whatever caught his eye instead, and he’d picked the short story anthology off the Sanborn shelves. He’d found “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in there, along with the Steinbecks and Conrad Aikens, written by a guy named Stephen Vincent Benét back in 1937.

The three of us—Bob Barrett ’82, Elliott Gimble ’84 and I—had a little campfire going along one of the setbacks downstream from the Ledyard Bridge for atmosphere and some light to read by. It must have been a slow night in Hanover—no Bruce Lee flicks in Webster Hall, no new Bond at the Nugget. Those guys had memorized enough Bond, in any event, for a stand-up routine that was better than the movies. Bob would throw off a line from Goldfinger or Dr. No and Gimby would imitate the electric guitar riff that played when things got tense for 007. They were always laughing. I’d never met anyone like them.

Big Bob, 7 feet tall, was a couple of years ahead of Gimby and me, but he’d meandered through college, taken some time off, worked a semester on the Kicking Horse reservation in Montana. At Dartmouth he spent a lot of time hanging out at Hanover Terrace, visiting with old folks instead of doing homework. He wasn’t going to be graduating with his class. He had, though, memorized the classic speech Patton had given to the Third Army in 1944: “We have the finest food, the finest equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world.” He was a philosophy major.

Gimby was 6-foot-5, a mostly kosher vegetarian with a huge heart and a soft spot for crullers at Lou’s. He would actually go on to do some stand-up at Collis and draw a crowd and fool around writing some hard-boiled stuff. He and Big Bob were like brothers, twins maybe, tall ones, separated at birth.

I was new to the friendship, quiet, the straight man, a good foot or more shorter than they were. I was the little brother. I looked up to both of them.

That night we’d eaten s’mores and were sitting around the fire talking. We’d read a couple of ghost stories, gritty pieces by Poe and Ambrose Bierce. Wood smoke drifted into the blackness. Big Bob turned to “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” The story is a classic: An unlucky New Hampshire farmer named Jabez Stone sells his soul to the devil—Mr. Scratch—in return for years of prosperity. He instantly regrets his decision, but he’d given his word, and “naturally, being a New Hampshireman, he couldn’t take it back.” At the end of his final year he turns in desperation to his neighbor, the great lawyer Dan’l Webster, to help him break the contract.

We passed the paperback around and read out loud, leaning in toward the firelight when it came our turn. In the story Webster says things like, “Well, I’ve got the Missouri Compromise to straighten out, and about 75 other things to do, but I’ll take your case. For if two New Hampshiremen aren’t a match for the devil, why, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.” After besting Scratch in a surreal, all-night trial in front of a rigged jury and hanging judge, he says to Scratch, “...you’ll sit right down at that table and draw up a document, promising never to bother Jabez Stone nor his heirs or assigns nor any other New Hampshireman till doomsday! For any hades we want to raise in this state, we can raise ourselves, without assistance from strangers.” We laughed at that and at all the other over-the-top lines in the story. It was just our kind of camp. But the story was also about loyalty and the pride and sadness of being a man. And, of course, Webster had gone to Dartmouth, class of 1801.

We finished reading. The fire died down to coals. Out in the darkness, the river slid by. We were young, becoming best friends, talking together on a summer night. “Let’s make a pact. Right here tonight,” Big Bob said, in his deep, croaking voice. And so we put our hands in and officially formed the Devil and Dan Club. We drew up no bylaws, had no conditions save one: to gather at least once a year for the rest of our lives and read “The Devil and Daniel Webster” out loud.

It’s amazing to me, all this time later, how well I can remember that night. That was 29 years ago—and more readings ago than that, if you count the years we’ve read the story together more than once. By now we can practically recite the thing by heart (it’s a short story). But honestly: 29 years and counting, through cross-country moves and career changes and marriages and kids and good times and hard times. In wild places and living rooms and restaurants and on one memorable canoe trip in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota when Big Bob and I made the mistake of stuffing ourselves at an Old Country Buffet restaurant before doing the food shopping for the weeklong trip. Nothing in the grocery store appealed; we badly under-bought for the trip, dubbed it the Gandhi diet, said all we needed was fishing licenses, anyway, but couldn’t humor Gimby when we all got hungry three days in. Miraculously, on the fourth day Gimby caught a lake trout big enough to feed us all several times over. (“Kill it! Kill it!” the almost-kosher vegetarian screamed when the fish flopped off the hook in the canoe.) That was the same trip that Gimby struggled mightily—exasperated, muttering inside the dark tent—to zip himself into what he thought was his sleeping bag but turned out to be his down parka. But I digress.

We’ve met for the annual reading of the Devil and Dan Club in seven different states, often just the three of us, but many times with kids and spouses and significant others, including, on occasion, some Dartmouth classmates. (Mike Swartz ’82 was part of that Boundary Waters trip; he’s never forgotten it.) We’ve joked that when we get old and have trouble getting around, we’ll gather overnight somewhere and read on December 31 and then again the next morning, picking off two years in 24 hours.

I’m not sure any of us took the reading very seriously at first. Gimby and Big Bob were living close by, in New Haven, Connecticut, and Boston, and I was in New Hampshire. We were all still single and footloose and didn’t need an annual excuse to get together. It would be years before we started to regard the story as anything more than a lark. But something about the ritual got inside us—at least in me, the sentimental one. Back before the Internet would have made such things easy, I used a local antique bookseller to track down original hardback editions of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” so we could all read from the real thing. I broke them out the year we read by a fire in the woods in Harrisville, New Hampshire. That night we signed each other’s copies in ink and began recording the dates and places of the readings on the blank pages at the back of the book. Lately, when I’m standing by the bookshelf in my office, I find myself pulling down my copy and flipping to those pages in the back, and I’m flooded with memories. The book’s binding is loosening. The yellowed paper has become brittle. It’s one of the possessions I treasure most.

In the pivotal speech Webster makes during Stone’s trial, Benét describes how Webster “began with the simple things that everybody’s known and felt—the freshness of a fine morning when you’re young, and the taste of food when you’re hungry, and the new day that’s every day when you’re a child. He took them up and turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man.”

Gimby and Big Bob would probably laugh at me for saying this, but I’m the little brother, and the sentimental one, so maybe I can get away with it. To Webster’s list I’d add two more: friendships and the promises we make and honor.

Jim Collins shelves his copy of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in Orange, New Hampshire.