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They strolled on through the woods together, the younger boy’s gayety and enthusiasm showing in pleasing contrast to Tom’s stolid manner.

He was a wholesome, vivacious boy, this Willetts, with a breeziness which seemed to captivate even his sober companion, and if Tom had felt any slight annoyance at being thus overhauled by a comparative stranger, the feeling quickly passed in the young scout’s cheery company.

“They told me down in camp that if I need a guide, philosopher, and friend, I’d better run you down, or up——”

“If you’d gone a little to the left you’d have found it easier,” Tom said, in his usual matter-of-fact manner.

“Oh, I suppose you know all the highways and byways and right ways and left ways and every which ways for miles and miles around,” Hervey Willetts said. “I guess they were right when they said you’d be a good guide, philosopher, and friend, hey?”

“I don’t know what a philosopher is,” Tom said, with characteristic blunt honesty, “but I know all the trails around here, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you mean about guides?” Hervey asked, just a trifle puzzled. “That’s an expression, guide, philosopher, and friend. It comes from Shakespeare or one of those old ginks; it means a kind of a moral guide, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Tom.

“But I need, I need, I need, I need a friend,” Hervey said.

“You seem to have lots of friends down there,” Tom said.

“A scout is observant, hey?” Willetts laughed.

“I mean you always seem to have a lot of fellows with you,” Tom said, ignoring the compliment. “Everybody likes your troop, that’s sure. And your troop seems to be stuck on you.”

“Good night!” Hervey laughed. “They won’t be stuck on me after Saturday. That’ll be the end of my glorious career.”

“What did you do?” Tom asked, after his customary fashion of construing talk literally.

“Oh, I didn’t exactly commit a murder,” the other laughed, “but I fell down, Sla—you don’t mind my calling you Slady, do you?”

“That’s what most everybody calls me,” Tom said, “except the troop I was in. They call me Tomasso.”

“Sounds like tomato, hey?” Hervey laughed. “No, my troubles are about merit badges. I’ve bungled the whole thing up. When a fellow goes after the Eagle award, he ought to have a manager, that’s what I say. He ought to have a manager to plan things out for him. I tried to manage my own campaign and now I’m stuck—with a capital S.”

“How many merits have you got?” Tom asked him.

“Twenty,” Hervey said, “twenty and two-thirds. Just a fraction more and I’d have gone over the top.”

“You mean a sub-division?” Tom asked.

“That’s where the little but comes in,” Hervey said. “B-u-t, but. It’s a big word, all right, just as you said.”

“Is it architecture or cooking or interpreting or one of those?” Tom asked.

Hervey glanced at Tom in frank surprise.

“Maybe it’s leather work, or machinery, or taxidermy or marksmanship,” Tom continued, with no thought further from his mind than that of showing off.

“Guess again,” Hervey laughed.

“Then it must be either music or stalking,” Tom said, dully.

His companion paused in his steps, contemplating Tom with unconcealed amazement. “Right-o,” he said; “it’s stalking. What are you? A mind reader?”

“Those are the only ones that have three tests,” Tom said. “So if you have twenty merits and two-thirds of a merit, why, you must be trying for one of those. Maybe they’ve changed it since I looked at the handbook.”

Hervey Willetts stood just where he had stopped, looking at Tom with admiration. In his astonishment he glanced at Tom’s arm as if he expected to see upon it the tangible evidences of his companion’s feats and accomplishments. But the only signs of scouting which he saw there were the brown skin and the firm muscles.

“They change that book every now and then,” Tom said.

Still Hervey continued to look. “What’s that belt made out of?” he asked.

“It’s fiber from a string tree,” Tom said; “they grow in Lorraine in France.”

“Were you in France?”

“Two years,” Tom said.

“How many merit badges have you got, anyway, Mr.—Slady?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tom said; “about thirty or thirty-five, I guess.”

“You guess? I bet you’ve got the Gold Cross. Where is it?” Hervey made a quick inspection of Tom’s pongee shirt, but all he saw there was the front with buttons gone and the brown chest showing.

“I couldn’t pin it on there very well, could I?” Tom said, lured by his companion’s eagerness into a little show of amusement.

“Where is it?” Hervey demanded.

“I’m letting a girl wear it,” Tom said.

“Oh, what I know about you!” Hervey said, teasingly. “You can bet if I ever get the Gold Cross or the Eagle Badge (which I won’t this trip) no girl will ever wear them.”

“You can’t be so sure about that,” said Tom, out of his larger worldly experience, “sometimes they take them away from you.”

“You’re a funny fellow,” Hervey said, while his gaze still expressed his generous impulse of hero-worship. “I guess I seem like just a sort of kid to you with my twenty merits—twenty and two-thirds. Maybe some girl is wearing your Distinguished Service Cross, for all I know. But we fellows are crazy to have the Eagle award in our troop. I suppose of course you’re an Eagle Scout?”

“I guess that was about three or four years ago,” Tom said.

“Once a scout, always a scout, hey?”

“That’s it,” Tom said.

They strolled along in silence for a few minutes, Hervey occasionally stealing a side glimpse at his elder, who ambled on, apparently unconscious of these admiring glances. Now and again Tom paused to examine a patch of moss or some little tell-tale mark upon the ground, as if he had no knowledge of his companion’s presence. But Hervey appeared quite satisfied.

“I’ll tell you how it is,” he finally said, selecting what seemed an appropriate moment to speak; “I was elected as the one in our troop to go after the Eagle award. We want an Eagle Scout in our troop. We haven’t even got one in the city where I live.”

“Hear that?” Tom said. “That’s a thrush.”

“A thrush?”

“Yop; go on,” Tom said.

“So they elected me to win the Eagle award. Some choice, hey? I had seven badges to begin with; maybe that’s why they wished it onto me. I had camping, cooking, athletics, pioneering, angling, that’s a cinch, that’s easy, and, let’s see—carpentry and bugling. That’s the easiest one of the lot, just blow through the cornet and claim the badge. It’s a shame to take it.”

“You mean you’ve won thirteen more since you’ve been here?” Tom asked.

“That’s it,” said Hervey. “First I got my fists on the eleven that have got to be included in the twenty-one, and then I made up a list of ten others and went to it. I chose easy ones, but some of them didn’t turn out to be so easy. Music—oh, boy! And when I started to play the piano, they said I wasn’t playing at all, but that I really meant it. Can you beat that?”

Tom could not help smiling.

“So you see I’ve been pretty busy since I’ve been here, too busy to talk to interviewers, hey? I’ve piled up thirteen since I’ve been here; that’s a little over six weeks. That isn’t so bad, is it?”

“It’s good,” Tom said, by no means carried away by enthusiasm.

“I thought you’d say so. So now I’ve got twenty and I know them all by heart. Want to hear me stand up in front of the class and say them?”

“All right,” Tom said.

“No sooner said than stung,” Hervey flung back at him. “Well, I’ve got first aid, physical development, life saving, personal health, public health, cooking, camping, bird study——”

“That’s a good one,” Tom said.

“You said it; and I’ve got pioneering, pathfinding, athletics, and then come the ten that I selected myself; angling, bugling, carpentry, conservation or whatever you call it, and cycling and firemanship and music hath charms, not, and seamanship and signaling. And two-thirds of the stalking badge. I bet you’ll say that’s a good one.”

“There’s one good one that you left out,” Tom said. “I thought you’d think of it on account of that last one.”

“You mean stalking?”

“I mean another that has something to do with that?”

“Now you’ve got me guessing,” Hervey said.

“Well, how do you want me to help you?” Tom asked, thus stifling his companion’s inquisitiveness.

“Well,” said Hervey, ready, even eager to adapt himself to Tom’s mood, “all I’ve got to do is to track an animal for a half a mile or so——”

“A quarter of a mile,” Tom said.

“And then I’m an Eagle Scout,” Hervey concluded. “But if I want to be in on the hand-outs Saturday night, I’ve got to do it between now and Saturday, and that’s what has me worried. I want to go home from here an Eagle Scout. Gee, I don’t want all my work to go for nothing.”

“You want what you want when you want it, don’t you?” Tom said, smiling a little.

“It’s on account of my troop, too,” Hervey said. “It isn’t just myself that I’m thinking about. Jiminies, maybe I didn’t choose the best ones, you know more about the handbook than I do, that’s sure, and I suppose that one badge was just as easy as another to you. Maybe you think I just chose easy ones, hey?”

“Well, what’s on your mind?” Tom said.

“Do you know where there are any wild animal tracks?” Hervey blurted out with amusing simplicity. “I don’t mean just exactly where, but do you know a good place to hunt for any? A couple of fellows told me you would know, because you know everything of that sort. So I thought maybe you could give me a tip where to look. I found a horseshoe last night so maybe I’ll be lucky. All I want is to get started on a trail.”

“Sometimes there are different trails and they take you to the same place,” Tom said.

No doubt this was one of the sort of remarks that Tom was famous for making which had either no particular meaning or a meaning poorly expressed.

Hervey stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t care whether it’s easy or hard, if that’s what you mean. Is it true that there are wild cats up in these mountains?”

“Some,” Tom said.

“Well, if you were in my place, where would you go to look for a trail? I mean a real trail, not a cow or a horse or Chocolate Drop’s^[1] kitten. If I can just dig up the trail of a wild animal somewhere, right away quick, the Eagle award is mine—ours. See? Can you give me a tip?”

Tom’s answer was characteristic of him and it was not altogether satisfactory.

“I’m not so stuck on eagles,” he said.

[1] Chocolate Drop was the negro cook at Temple Camp.