Tom Slade on Mystery Trail | Page 3

the edge of the cooking shack and to the little
avenue of patrol cabins beyond. As he hurried along, the big brass
compass flopped about and sometimes banged against his belt buckle,
making quite a noise. Several boys laughed as he passed them, trotting
along as if possessed by a vision. But no one stopped him or spoke to
him.
In the patrol cabin where he belonged, he rooted in great haste and
excitement among the contents of a cheap pasteboard suit case and
presently pulled out a torn and battered old copy of the scout handbook.
He sat down on the edge of his cot and, hurriedly looking through the
index, opened the book at page thirty. He was breathing so hard that he
almost gulped, and his thin little hands trembled visibly....
CHAPTER III
THE "ALL BUT" SCOUT
In that same hour, perhaps a little earlier or later, I cannot say, Tom
Slade, having finished his duties for the day, strolled along the lake
shore away from camp and struck into the woods which extended
northward as far as the Dansville road.
He had no notion of where he was going; he was going nowhere in
particular. For aught I know he was going to ponder on the
responsibility which had been thrust upon him by the scout powers that
be, of judging stalking photographs preliminary to awarding the
Audubon prize offered by the historical society in his home town.
Perhaps he was under the influence of a little pensive regret that the
season was coming to an end and wished to have this lonely parting

with his beloved hills and trees. It is of no consequence. About all he
actually did was to kick a stick along before him and pause now and
again to examine the caked green moss on trees.
When he had reached a little eminence whence the view behind him
was unobstructed, he turned and looked down upon the camp. Perhaps
in that brief glimpse the whole panorama of his adventurous life spread
before him in his mind's eye, and he saw the vicious little hoodlum that
he had once been transformed into a scout, pass through the several
ranks of scouting, grow up, go to war, and come back to be assistant at
the camp where he had spent so many happy hours when he was a
young boy.
And now there was not one thing down there, nor shack nor cabin nor
shooting range nor boat nor canoe, nor hero's elm (as they called it),
nor Gold Cross Rock, which had the same romantic interest as had this
young fellow to the scouts who came in droves and watched him and
listened to the talk about him and dreamed of being just such a real
scout as he. He moved about unconsciously among them, simple,
childlike, stolid, but with a kind of assurance and serenity which he
may have learned from the woods.
He was singularly oblivious to the superficial appurtenances of
scouting. He had passed through that stage. The pomp and vanity of the
tenderfoot he knew not. The bespangled dignity of the second-class and
first-class scout, these things he had known and outgrown. His medals
were home somewhere. And out of all this alluring rigmarole and
romantic glory were left the deeper marks of scout training, burned into
his soul as the mark is burned into the skin of a broncho. The woods,
the trees, were his. That, after all, is the highest award in scouting. It is
a medal that one does not lose, and it lasts forever.
As Tom Slade stood there looking down upon the camp, one might
have seen in him the last and fullest accomplishment of scouting,
stripped of all else. His face was the color of a mulatto. He wore no
scout hat, he wore no hat at all. It would have been quite superfluous
for him to have worn any of his thirty or forty merit badges of fond
memory on his sleeves, for his sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders.

He wore a pongee shirt, this being a sort of compromise between a shirt
and nothing at all. He wore moccasins, but not Indian moccasins. He
was still partial to khaki trousers, and these were worn with a strange
contraption for a belt; it was a kind of braided fiber of his own
manufacture, the material of which was said to have been taken from a
string tree.
As he resumed his way through the woods he presently heard a cheery,
but rather exhausted, voice behind him.
"Have a heart, Slady, and wait a minute, will you?" Tom's pursuer
called. "I'm nearly dead climbing up through all this jungle after you.
Old Mother Nature's got herself into a fine mess of a