A hand-to-hand combat with more tangled underbrush, which they tore and chopped away, brought them to comparatively open land which must have been very high for they were surprised to see, far below, several twinkling specks of light which they thought to be at Temple Camp. It was the first open view they had had.
They called again, and again the voice answered, clearly audible now, crying, “Help help!” and something more which the boys could not understand. They called, telling the speaker not to come in search of them, that they would come to him, and to answer them for guidance when they called.
They plunged into more thicket, tearing it aside with a will, sometimes going astray, then pausing to listen for the guiding voice, and pushing on again through the labyrinth.
After a little they fell into a path and then could hear the brook rushing over stones not far distant, and knew that it must verge to the east as Tom had said and that the path did lead to it. It would have been a long journey following the stream.
Soon a greater intercourse of speech was possible and they called cheerily that they were scouts and for the waiter to cheer up for they would soon be with him.
Presently, along the path they could hear the sound of footsteps. Tom, who was leading the way, raised his lantern and just beyond the radius of its flickering light they could see a dark figure hurrying toward them; then a face, greatly distraught in the moonlight, and Tom stopped, bewildered. As the stranger grasped his arm he held the light close to the haggard, wild-eyed face.
“Hello,” he said, “I—I guess I know you. Let go—what’s the matter? Weren’t you at Temple Camp last summer?”
The stranger, a young fellow of perhaps eighteen, shook his head.
“With one of the troops from——?”
“No,” said the young man.
“Hmn,” said Tom, still holding the lantern up; “I thought——Don’t you fellows remember him?”
Connie shook his head; Garry also.
“Never saw him in my life,” said Doc.
“Hmn,” said Tom. “Maybe I——just for a minute I thought——I guess you fellows are right.”
The stranger was dressed in the regulation camping outfit—the kind of costume usually seen on dummies in the windows of sporting goods stores in the spring, with a spick and span tent in the background, a model lunch basket near by and a canoe crowded in. His nobby outfit was very much the worse for wear, however, and he looked about as fresh as the immaculate Phoebe Snow would look after a real railroad journey.
“Maybe I can be rescued now,” he said imploringly, clinging to Tom. “I saw the lights way down there. There was only one till tonight and tonight I counted seven—little bits of ones. I tried to get to them, but I got lost. You can’t go to them. It looks as if you can, but you can’t. They’re just as far away, no matter how far you go—they get farther and farther. Nobody can ever get away from here. Are you afraid of dead people?”
“No,” said Doc. “We’re scouts. Is——”
“If a person looks very different, then he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Come on,” said Doc. “We’ll see.”
“We’ll never get off this hill; I’ve tried every way——”
“Oh, yes, we will,” spoke up Garry, putting his arm over the boy’s shoulder and urging him along.
They could see that he was hardly rational, and Garry, better than any of the others, knew how to handle him.
“It’s terrible without a light,” he said; “I spilled all the oil—I’m glad you’ve got a light.”
“What’s your name?” Garry asked.
“Jeffrey Waring—come on, I’ll show you the place.” He shuddered as he spoke.
Once more Tom held his lantern up to the white, distracted face.
“He was never at camp,” laughed Doc.
“Hmn,” said Tom, apparently but half convinced.
A few steps brought them to a little clearing where stood a rough shack. Outside it, fastened against a tree, was a vegetable crate with bars nailed across it—the silent evidence of departed pets. Several fishing rods lay against a tree. Close by was a makeshift fireplace. On a rough bunk inside the shack lay a man, no longer young, with iron gray hair. His eyes were open and staring and one seemed larger than the other. Doc felt his pulse and found that he was living.
“He fell on the rocks and hurt his arm—I think it’s broken,” said Jeffrey. “It bled and I bandaged it.”
Doc raised the bandaged arm and it fell heavily. Removing the bandage carefully he saw that the cut itself was not dangerous, but from first-aid studies he thought the man was suffering from an apoplectic stroke or something of that nature. He wondered if the injury to the arm had not been incidental to the man’s seizure and sudden fall. People sometimes lingered in an unconscious condition for days, he knew. It was hardly a case for first-aid, but it was certainly a case for skill and resource, for whatever happened the patient, dead or living, would have to be taken away from this mountain camp.
With Garry’s help, he raised the victim into a recumbent posture, piling everything available under the head while Connie hurried back and forth to the brook, bringing wet applications for the head and neck.
There was no sign of returning consciousness and the question was how to get the patient away down to Temple Camp where medical aid might be had, and where any contingency might be best handled.
The four boys, greatly hampered in their discussion by Jeffrey, whose long vigil had brought him to the verge of collapse, decided that it would be quite useless to signal for help, since it would mean another expedition with most of the difficulties of their own, even if attempted after daybreak.
So they decided to wait for dawn, which happily would come soon, and with the first sign of it to send a smudge signal that they were coming and to have a doctor at camp. They believed that in the daylight they could carry the patient back over the same path which they had so laboriously opened and though delay was irksome this plan seemed the only feasible one to follow.
Despite their weariness none could sleep, so they kindled a little fire and sat about it chatting while they counted time, impatiently waiting for the first streak of daylight.
It was then that they learned from the overwrought boy something of his history, but they got it piecemeal and had to patch together as best they could his rather disjointed talk.
“Is he your father?” Doc asked.
“No, he’s my uncle,” said Jeffrey. “He isn’t a real governor; I only call him that. He’s eccentric—know what that is? If we hadn’t come trout fishing it would have been all right. I could have sent my pigeons from the boat—I’ve got a regular coop there—it cost thirty dollars.”
“But you like the stalking, don’t you?” Connie asked.
“Yes, but I can’t be quiet enough—I can’t sneak up to them. You have to be quiet and stealthy when you stalk.”
They made out that Mr. Waring was something of a sportsman and was wealthy and eccentric.
“We live in a big house in Vale Centre,” Jeffrey told them, “and we have fountains and I have twenty-seven pigeons and two dogs—and I can have anything I want except an automobile. I can’t have an automobile because I’m nervous.”
“You don’t mean you live near Edgevale Village, down the Hudson?” Garry asked in surprise. “I live about two miles from the Centre myself.”
“We live in a house that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, but I like our boat best. If there’s a war we’re going to give it to the government, but if there isn’t any war it’s going to be mine some day.”
It appeared that Jeffrey and his uncle lived alone, save for the servants, and had cruised up the Hudson to Catskill Landing in their boat for the trout fishing of which the old gentleman was fond. How the pair had happened to penetrate to this isolated spot was not quite clear, but the boys gathered that it had been a favorite haunt of Mr. Waring’s youthful days.
“He told me he’d bring me and show me,” said Jeffrey, “and that we’d stay here and catch fish and I could send my pigeons back to James—he’s our chauffeur—and I’d get better so’s I could remember things better. Do you think you get better living in the woods?”
“Surest thing you know,” said Garry.
The picture of the kindly old gentleman, bringing his none too robust nephew to this lonely spot, which lingered in his memory perhaps as the scene of woodland sports of his own boyhood, touched the four boys and seemed to bring them in closer sympathy with the figure that lay prone and motionless within the little shack.
“I can have anything I want,” Jeffrey told them again. “Spotty cost fifty dollars, but he died. That’s because I was sick and my brain didn’t work good. My other carrier cost thirty dollars and I sent him to James to tell him the governor was hurt.”
The scouts told him the fate of the pigeon and of how they had received the message.
“But we’ll never get away from here,” Jeffrey said hopelessly. “We’ll never find our way back.”
With the first light of dawn Garry increased the dying blaze and sent the smudge signal. Piling damp leaves on the fire he caused a straight thin column of thick smoke to rise high into the air and by inverting the deserted pigeon coop over this, and removing and replacing it as the Morse code required, he imprinted against the vast gray dawn the words
COMING HAVE DOCTOR
They knew well enough that some one in the camp would keep sleepless vigil, watching for just such a message. Three times the words were spelled out in smoke to make sure that they would be caught and understood.
To Jeffrey, whose only resource had been his pet pigeon and who had been unnerved by his inability to find his way from the hill, the sending of this message and the quiet orderly preparations for departure which followed were the cause of gaping amazement. He clung to Garry, as the others got his uncle onto the stretcher, and walked along at his side, plying him with excited questions. Sometimes it was necessary for him to take a corner while one of the scouts went ahead to open a way and then his panic was pitiable.
It did not seem at all peculiar to the others that he should single out Garry and cling to him, for everybody fell for Garry almost at first sight. What they did notice was that he appeared to shun Tom, who, indeed, was entitled to all his gratitude and was the hero of the occasion if anyone was.
But then he was a queer boy anyway, and thoroughly shaken up by his experience.
As for Garry, the sudden hit which he had apparently made quite amused him.
“You should worry,” he said, laughingly to Tom.
And Tom shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
CHAPTER VII
“UNDER WHICH KING?”
“And, oh it was great the way you sent that signal. Gee, a smudge message is no cinch—I always said so. You can talk about your wireless and your wigwagging and semaphoring and fire signalling and all, but you got to admit smudging is hardest of all—gee, you got to admit that!”
“It’s easy as pie,” said one of the group, making an imposing smudge upon Gordon Lord’s round face by way of proof.
“Because,” continued Gordon, calmly wiping his cheek, “because you can’t shut it off so sudden.”
“Something like you, hey, kiddo?” smiled his tall friend, Arnold, who stood near him.
“It’s hard to read,” Gordon went on, undaunted, “but it’s even harder to send. Of course, even if it had mistakes, he could read it,” he added, indicating Harry Arnold, “because he can do pretty nearly anything. But you sure are a peach of a scout—gee, I got to admit that.”
Having thus delivered his verdict, he gave a tug to his stocking which had a way of slipping down, as one might say, whenever his back was turned.
“A scout’s got to be magmanigous,” he concluded, as he tugged up the other stocking.
“Well, I thank you for the compliment,” laughed Garry Everson, “undeserved though it be. I think the skill is always on the receiving end but we won’t quarrel about it,” he added, turning to Arnold.
Little Raymond Hollister clung to Garry as if he feared the crowd might kidnap him, his face beaming with pride at all this praise showered upon his hero.
“When we were a patrol last year,” he ventured, “he received them as well as sent them. Anybody that was here last summer can tell you how he saved a fellow’s life, too.”
“Yes, but it was one of our troop that bandaged him,” piped up Pee-wee Harris of the Silver Foxes; “it was Doc Carson.”
“You’ll lose your reputation,” someone laughed at Arnold, “if you don’t look out.”
“Sure, watch your rep when the Bridgeboro Sprouts get started,” said Roy Blakeley. “I guess we better put them to bed now, hadn’t we?” he asked, winking at Jeb Rushmore. “The trouble with this blamed camp is, there are too many heroes.”
“There isn’t anybody here can beat Harry being a hero!” Gordon bristled, in prompt defense of his friend.
“Sure there is,” said Roy.
“Who?” Gordon demanded.
“Do you know Fat Burns?”
“No.”
“Well, put some on the fire and see,” said Roy.
Gordon ignored the laugh at his expense. “Even girls say so,” he said, “Gee, I hope a girl knows a hero when she sees one.”
Little Raymond, still keeping close to Garry, laughed silently, but he did not venture again into the arena.
“I reckon the real hero o’ this here business ain’t said nuthin’? and ain’t hed nuthin’ said fur him, this far,” drawled Jeb.
“Right you are!” said Doc Carson. “Tomasso Slade.”
“Thou never spakest a truer word,” said Roy.
Tom stood among them, his hair still frowzled, his faded gray shirt torn, his belt drawn much tighter than necessary, and a disfiguring scratch across his rather lowering countenance. He did not look at all like the scouts on the cover of Boy’s Life.
“I don’t see as anybody’s a hero in particular,” he said, disconcerted at being brought into the limelight. “I don’t see’s you can be a hero just climbing up a hill. That’s all we did. That girl in the munition factory that stayed at her telephone when the shells were flying around—she was what I call a hero.”
“She was a shero, Tomasso,” corrected Roy.
“I think Hobson was a hero, too,” Tom added soberly. “I’m satisfied to be at the head of my patrol and be a first class scout——”
“And to have the gold cross,” someone interrupted, referring to his winning of this coveted medal the previous summer.
“Well, of course, I’m glad I’ve got that, too,” Tom said. “Maybe if we get into a war with Germany we’ll have a chance to be heroes, for sure—like the English scouts. I ain’t neutral, anyway. I ain’t neutral any more since last Tuesday.”
It was exactly like Tom to announce his repudiation of neutrality in this sudden fashion and in face of his scoutmaster’s admonition that all the troop should honor the President’s express wish. It was also exactly like him to begin on one subject and to end with some blunt announcement on another. His mention of “last Tuesday” referred to the torpedoing of a ship by a German submarine.
“All right, Tom,” said Mr. Ellsworth, who understood him perfectly, “but we mustn’t shout about it, you know, because we’re not in the war—”
“Torpedoing’s kind of like hitting below the belt,” said Tom, “but that ain’t what I wanted to say. I didn’t say anything about that fellow till they took his uncle away——”
“You mean Jeffrey here?”
“Yes—because it didn’t seem right—sort of. But now he’s here alone with us, I suppose he’ll join one of the troops and I’d like to have him join my patrol because I need one more member and I think he’ll be good on stalking and I want a stalking badge in my patrol. Maybe he could come back and live in Bridgeboro somewhere if his uncle should——”
“Surely, Tom,” said Mr. Ellsworth, quick to prevent him from finishing his sentence.
“I don’t mean I want it just as a reward—’cause I don’t think I did anything special. But I got just one more member to get and——”
There was a slight movement in the group and Jeffrey Waring brushed past the others and grasped Garry’s arm.
“I want to be in his club,” said he, looking almost imploringly at Mr. Ellsworth. “I want to join his class; he can send a message even better than a pigeon can take it, and it’s sure to get there. He can do it just with smoke. I want to join his class.”
He was greatly excited, as he always became when he talked and Garry winking significantly at the Bridgeboro Troop’s scoutmaster, strolled away with Jeffrey clinging to him and Raymond following.
Tom Slade stood motionless, stolid, and said not a word. Then, in a moment, Roy Blakeley went over and stood beside him, resting his arm on Tom’s shoulder.
Once, a couple of years before, when Tom was a hoodlum and John Temple was an old grouch, the capitalist had strode down through a field where Tom was trespassing, shouting threats and imprecations at the waif, whose first impulse was to run. Turning to do so, he had found Roy Blakeley, scout, standing by him, and had felt Roy’s arm on his shoulder. And Tom Slade, hoodlum, did not run. Goodness, it seems like ancient history now, with Tom head of a patrol and “Old Man” Temple founder and trustee of the big Temple Camp!
But Mr. Ellsworth and Doc Carson and Westy and others of the Ravens and Silver Foxes, remembered, and they noticed how Roy Blakeley stepped forward now and put his arm over Tom’s shoulder, just as he had then.
“You should worry, Tomasso,” they heard him say in an undertone.
CHAPTER VIII
JEFFREY WARING
The scene just described was in the Pow-wow Circle, as they called the open space where the camp fire burned by night at Temple Camp. After a difficult descent of the hill the boys had been met at the wood’s edge by Jeb with more scouts, a couple of visiting scoutmasters and a physician from the not far distant village. To Jeffrey, whose poor efforts had been so futile and bewildering, this orderly sequel to Garry’s smudge signal was nothing less than a miracle, and he gazed at the party from camp as if they had dropped from the clouds.
Despite their burden and the special caution which had been necessary in picking their way down, the descent had been easier than the laborious journey in the dark the night before, but it was long past noontime when they emerged at the edge of the woods.
Perhaps it was natural that Jeffrey, not knowing of that battle with the thicket and the darkness should have seen the signalling as the most astonishing feat, and since Doc had assumed responsibility for his injured uncle and in a way superintended the descent, perhaps it was natural too that the first-aid boy, who received a flattering comment from the real doctor, should come second to Garry in his estimation. Whatever his peculiarities, he certainly did not stint his hero-worship. But Tom he disregarded altogether.
“Do you know why that is?” said Gordon Lord, of the First Oakwood, N. J., Troop, talking the thing over with Honorable Pee-wee Harris, of Bridgeboro. “Do you know why that is?”
Pee-wee couldn’t guess, but he hazarded the observation that Jeffrey was a kind of a nut.
“It’s because Tom Slade doesn’t wear any uniform,” said Gordon. “It’s the uniform that gets people—specially girls. Gee, they all fall for the uniform—everybody does. You wouldn’t catch me going without it.”
“I don’t know why Tom doesn’t wear one,” said Pee-wee. “But even if he did I don’t think girls would notice him much—he isn’t that kind. He’s kind of clumsy, like. He worked after school all winter and he must have got a lot of money saved up, but when Roy asked him if he wasn’t going to get a suit and things, he said he wasn’t going to bother—he was more comfortable that way. We all got new outfits this year. Mr. Ellsworth says Tom’s a kind of a law inside himself—or something like that.”
It troubled Gordon that a boy who could do the things Tom had done should eschew the khaki regalia, the hanging jack knife, the belt axe and the scarf, and he spoke to Roy about it.
“Search me, kiddo,” said Roy. “He ought to have forty-’leven dollars and some trading stamps saved up. He’s a thrifty soul and he sold the Friday Evening Pest all winter. It’s got me guessing. Maybe he’s sending it to Belgium—he’s come out strong for the Allies now. He’s a sketch.”
The doctor had shaken his head when he looked at Mr. Waring, and said that his life was hanging on a thread, and that the thread was pretty sure to break. They took him to the little hospital in the village and from there telegraphed to his home.
On the doctor’s suggestion, seconded by Jeb and the scoutmasters, the boy was kept at camp awaiting developments, and it was well toward evening of that first Sunday while they were waiting for supper, that the tension and suspense relaxed somewhat in this general talk which had ended in Jeffrey’s impulsive and rather surprising act.
To the great delight of Raymond the strange boy was allowed to bunk in the little cabin with himself and Garry, where he spent practically the whole of the next day watching Garry unpack his luggage and reading the Scout Handbook, turning more than once to the chapter about signalling, which he seemed to regard as a sort of sleight-of-hand.
He made an aimless tour about the camp, pausing here and there before tent or cabin and chatting with the scouts who received him kindly enough, listening to his rather rambling talk and affecting an interest in the wealth and especially the boat, of which he was never weary of boasting. He seemed fascinated with this view of real camp life. What the boys really thought of him it would be hard to say, but they were for the most part indulgent and if there were a few who yielded to the temptation to jolly him, they were promptly discouraged by the others.
For Garry, however, there was less patience and Jeffrey more than once felt moved to defend his hero against the plainer sort of abuse. The sarcastic references to his chosen friend he did not quite appreciate.
Garry, indeed, was paying dearly (especially at the hands of the Bridgeboro Troop) for his act of walking away with Jeffrey to the humiliation and disappointment of Tom Slade.
“Well,” said one scout, who was raising the patrol pennant outside his cabin as Jeffrey came along, “how do you think you like it?”
“Can you signal?” Jeffrey asked, as if that were really the important subject.
“I’m not so worse at it,” the scout replied, “but I’m not much good as a kidnapper.”
Jeffrey did not catch the sense of this. He looked at the boy for a moment and then strolled on, pausing in front of the Silver Fox’s cabin, where Roy Blakeley, Pee-wee Harris, and others of that notoriously flippant patrol were building a couple of balsam beds outside, for the overflow.
“Good-morning glory,” said Roy.
“How do you do drop—that’s the way you should answer him,” said Pee-wee; “come right back at him—don’t let him get away with it.”
Jeffrey stared. “That’s a good thick one,” he said, referring to a branch Roy was about to use.
“Sure, it was brought up on oatmeal,” said Roy. “Stand from under!”
Jeffrey hastened to get out of the way.
“How long is it?” said he.
“’Bout as long as a short circuit,” said Roy.
“What?”
“I said it’s a beautiful afternoon this morning,” said Roy. “Well, you got wished onto the large Edgevale Patrol, hey? Three members. Some patrol!”
“Whose cabin is that next one?” Jeffrey asked irrelevantly.
“That? That’s Mr. Rushmore’s cabin. He has charge of the grounds—all of ’em, even the coffee grounds.”
“What?” said Jeffrey.
“And the next cabin,” said Roy, “belongs to the Elks—Tom Slade.”
“I don’t like him so much,” said Jeffrey.
“You don’t, hey? Well, you might have got into a regular patrol,” said Roy, busy with his work. “It was up to you.”
Not having been of the party which rescued Jeffrey, and hence not having had the same opportunity to observe him, Roy was not as patient with him as some of the others.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded, wheeling about and becoming serious. “Don’t you know who you’ve got to thank for getting you out of your scrape? Don’t you know who saved you from starving up there? What’s the matter with you, anyway? I know fellows who’d be glad of the chance to get into the Elk Patrol. They’ve got the gold cross in that patrol, let me tell you—and sixteen merit badges! And you, like a big chump, pass it up, and run after that pair that isn’t any patrol at all! Let me tell you something, my fraptious boy, in case you should ever get to be a scout——”
“I am a scout,” said Jeffrey, and doubtless he thought he was.
“There’s a little old book with a red cover you’ve got to take a squint into before you’re a B. S., let me tell you. And it’s got some good dope about making sacrifices and being generous and you can’t be a good scout walking away with somebody else’s prize—you can’t! You tell your patrol leader, or whatever you call him, to look in that little old Handbook and see if he finds anything there that’ll give him the right to put one over on the fellow that found you and brought you here; and the fellow that saved his own life, too! Hand me that other branch, Pee-wee.”
Jeffrey could only stare.
“Is that cross solid gold?” he finally asked, weakly.
“Sure—14 carrots—a couple of turnips and a few potatoes. Stand out of the way, will you?”
Jeffrey made way for Westy Martin, who was tugging a balsam branch to Roy. Then he moved away together.
Outside the Elks’ cabin was Dory Bronson, spearing papers, for the Elks were a tidy lot and took great pride in their surroundings.
“Is that a game?” Jeffrey asked.
“Hello, Sister Anne,” said Dory. “What’s going to be the name of your patrol?”
“Do we have to have a name?” asked Jeffrey.
“You sure do. I was thinking ‘magpie’ would be a good one. They usually get everything in sight.”
Jeffrey was not good at repartee; he did not understand these boys and he could not cope with them. Much less did he understand the wholesome spirit of rivalry and of loyalty which now made Garry an outsider—ostracized for what the whole camp regarded as a piece of selfishness and unfairness. His winking at Mr. Ellsworth as he walked away with his new recruit was taken as a deliberate attempt to flaunt his triumph.
Some said he had changed since the previous summer. There were a few who said it was natural, perhaps, that he should have taken the strange boy under his wing so promptly, seeing that their homes were not far apart. But everyone agreed that by all the rules of the game Jeffrey should have gone with Tom.
“We asked Garry to go up the hill with us that night,” said Connie Bennet, “even though he isn’t in our troop, just because we liked him.”
“And we stopped at Edgevale and brought him along in the Good Turn,” said Will Bronson, “even though we were crowded already. And now he puts one over on us like that! He’s a fine scout!”
“Only you have to say it quick to keep from choking!” added Roy, who had stopped before the Elks cabin.
“He sure got away with it,” added Connie. “He’s got this Jeffrey, or whatever his name is, eating out of his hand.”
“You should worry,” said Roy, as he strolled on.
The next day two men arrived in an automobile, bringing with them the news that Jeffrey’s benefactor was dead. It cast a shadow over the camp even among the many who had not seen the injured man. The boy himself was greatly distressed, wringing his hands like a child, and clinging to Garry.
One of these gentlemen was Mr. Waring’s executor, the other a friend, and since both of them lived in Poughkeepsie, which was the nearest city to Edgevale, neither knew much about Mr. Waring’s home life. They agreed with Mr. Ellsworth that it would be in all ways best for this unfortunate nephew, who seemed to be Mr. Waring’s only survivor, to remain where he was, and accept the hospitality of the camp until his uncle’s affairs could be settled.
“Can I stay with Garry and Raymond and be in their club and take them out in my boat?” Jeffrey asked, excitedly; “it’s mine now, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you boys will have to settle that among yourselves,” said the executor; “but I don’t know about the boat,” he added. “Undoubtedly it will be yours, but you mustn’t try to run it by yourself. It would be all right to use it if these gentlemen (turning to Mr. Ellsworth and one of the camp trustees) will take charge of it.”
“Garry understands marine engines,” Raymond ventured timidly to the visitors, whom the boys had just been showing about the camp.
“Gee, is he after the boat, too?” sneered Connie.
“No, he isn’t after the boat!” Raymond flared back; “and he’s got a uniform and that’s more than your patrol leader has!” he added irrelevantly.
Garry quieted Raymond and the others laughed. No one had any resentment against him, nor much against Jeffrey, for whom they made full allowance, but Garry was ignored, and this was the unhappy sequel of his friendship with the Bridgeboro boys and of the expedition which he had made with three of them up the wooded hill.
It was not the policy of Jeb Rushmore nor of the scoutmasters and trustees to seek to adjust differences between the scouts and so the golden days (which were all too fleeting for quarrels and bad-feeling) were clouded by this estrangement.
At last, one day, Harry Arnold took it upon himself to go to Garry’s cabin and talk with him. He, at least, had not altogether shunned Garry and he felt free to approach him. He found him teaching Jeffrey to carve designs on a willow stick by artistic removal of the bark. Raymond was making birchbark ornaments.
“Hello,” said Garry; “want to join the kindergarten class?”
“Hello, Jeff, old scout!” said Arnold, slapping him on the shoulder. “Hello, Raymond, how’s the giant of the Hudson Highlands? I thought I’d drop around and see if you were still alive—you stay by yourselves so much.”
“We’re not exactly what you’d call popular,” said Garry, smiling a little. “How’s the birthday celebration coming on?”
“Swell. I understand Slade’s own patrol is going to give him one of those bugles that’s advertised in Scouting—so he can blow himself, Blakeley says—with a fancy cord and tassels and the names of all his patrol engraved on it. Too bad he hasn’t got a full patrol. Just one more name and——”
“What’s the camp going to give him?” interrupted Garry.
“The camp is going to give him a wireless set.”
“Gee!”
“It’s a peach, too! Did you hear what Jeb’s going to give him? An elk’s head—gee, you ought to see the antlers on it. He wrote to some ranch or other away out in Montana to send it. He shot the elk himself. Roosevelt told him it was one of the finest he ever saw.”
“He ought to know,” said Garry.
“There’s where you said something! It’ll be appropriate, hey—Elk Patrol. And, let’s see, the Bridgeboro Troop’s going to give him a high grade searchlight for tracking. Jeb nearly fell off his grocery box when he heard that! He thinks you ought to go blindfold when you’re tracking. Then there’s a lot of crazy stuff—that fellow Blakeley hasn’t had any sleep the last week thinking up fool things. He’s going to give Tom a cat’s collar to use for a belt.”
“That’s a good one,” laughed Raymond.
“And—oh, I don’t know what all. Pee-wee Harris is going to give him Boy’s Life for a year——”
“Next Saturday, isn’t it?” asked Garry, indifferently.
“Yes—Elks will be two years old. Blakeley was telling me their whole history. You don’t mind if I sit down on these bricks, do you. It’s kind of damp on the ground. Do all your own cooking here?”
“Yes, most of it. Make yourself at home.”
“Make yourself homely, as Blakeley would say,” laughed Arnold, changing his seat.
“Suppose you fellows go and get some more willow,” said Garry. “Go ahead with what you were saying,” he added, as Raymond and Jeffrey obediently started off toward the lake. “I was afraid you might say something that I wouldn’t want Jeff to hear. I have to be awful careful with him.”
“Queer duck, isn’t he!”
“Not when you know how to handle him. My father was a doctor and I’ve often heard him tell about people like that. I think he’s got what they call amnesia or something like that. I’ve a kind of a hunch that his—er, this Mr. Waring took him up there in that woods so’s he could just live quiet and natural like and maybe get better. I’ve often heard my father talk about the woods being a medicine for the mind. Don’t you remember there was some old duffer of a king who was cured that way—in some forest or other? I guess Jeff’s a whole lot better than he was when he first came up here in the woods. From little things he says sometimes, I guess he was pretty bad at first. Ever take a flyer at carving birchbark? Look here, what Jeff and the kid have done. They’re fiends at it.”
Arnold looked at Garry curiously.
“I want to talk to you about this Tom Slade—this patrol business.”
“I thought you did.”
“Of course, I’m kind of an outsider—it’s none of my business—except that I happened to be the one to get your smudge signal. But, of course, I’ve heard all about you and the Bridgeboro fellows last year—what good friends you were and all, and how Tom Slade went up through that fire to your shack up there, and it seems a blamed shame that you’re not good friends now. We’re all here such a short time anyway——”
“Next Monday for us,” said Garry, ruefully.
“That’s just what I was thinking. The birthday dinner, then Sunday and then——”
“There’ll be others here to take our places though,” finished Garry.
“And I was wondering,” continued Arnold, “if we couldn’t kind of straighten things up before that. You know, ever since that first night I’ve sort of hung out with the Bridgeboro fellows. Gordon and I are here on our own hook and he sort of stands in with Pee-wee—and, oh, I don’t know, Tom and Blakeley sort of got me. That first night when you fellows were up the hill Blakeley spieled off a lot of stuff at campfire. He told us all about their trip up in the motor-boat last year and about the fellow that used to own it—how he lost his life. Funny though, how that part of the rowboat got back to the launch, wasn’t it? I guess Tom’s notion doesn’t amount to much, though. Anyway, that’s what ‘our beloved scoutmaster’ as Roy calls him, seems to think.”
“Mr. Ellsworth?”
“Yes. He says Tom’s got a little vein of the dime novel in him—‘Back From Death’ or the ‘Mystery of the Busted Dory’ as Roy says. He calls Tom Sherlock Nobody Holmes.”
“I guess nobody understands Tom Slade very well,” said Garry.
“I suppose maybe that’s just the reason the troop makes such a lot of him. If you played—if somebody played a mean trick on—on—Doc Carson, for instance, the fellows wouldn’t be so sore about it. But when you put one over on Tom you hit them all.”
“Do you think I play mean tricks?” queried Garry, beginning to carve a willow stick.
“I didn’t say that. But you can see Tom is a favorite and anybody with two squinters in his head, surely any scout, can see why. He came out of the slums and he’s poor and in some ways he’s different from these fellows. They’re all rich fellows and pretty well educated—you know what I mean. They made him a scout, and they’re always on the watch for fear he’ll see some difference. They’re proud of him because he’s made good and they’re going to see to it that the scouts make good. They want him to have all that’s coming to him just because he hasn’t got some things that they’ve got—you understand, don’t you?”
“I think I come pretty near knowing what it is to be poor,” said Garry, whittling.
“Well, these fellows here have been pretty decent to you, too, first and last, haven’t they?”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“Do you know what I think?” said Arnold, after a pause.
“What?”
“Every fellow has some kind of a bug. Pee-wee’s bug is good turns. Doc Carson’s bug is first-aid—honest, I believe that fellow’d give you a black eye just for the fun of putting a bandage on it——”
Garry laughed.
“I’m Gordon’s bug. Tom’s bug is that poor fellow that’s been dead two years—and they kid the life out of him about it.”
“Do they?”
“Sure; and your bug is——”
“Break it to me gently.”
“Your bug is Raymond Hollister.”
“He’s getting to be a strong, healthy bug, don’t you think?”
“I think that’s just the reason you copped this new fellow, Jeffrey. You wanted to please Raymond. And you let them both think that you’re a patrol——”
Garry smiled.
“I think maybe the fact that Jeffrey lives near you——”
“It isn’t so near.”
“Well, anyway, I think maybe that has something to do with it. But I’m going to pass you some straight talk, Everson, and I don’t want you to get mad. You know, Slade is crazy about his patrol and by all the rules of the game this fellow belongs with him. He’s nutty about his patrol, whereas you haven’t really any patrol at all.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“Well, then, why not let Tom have him?”
“Jeffrey isn’t a slave.”
“I know, but he’ll do anything you tell him is best for him.”
“Well, I think it’s best for him to stay right here where he is.”
Arnold rose angrily. Garry went on whittling.