Boy Scouts on the Trail

BY JOHN GARTH
PUBLISHED WITH THE APPROVAL OF THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA
PUBLISHERS BARSE & CO. NEW YORK, N. Y. NEWARK, N. J.
Copyright, 1920 by BARSE & CO. Printed in the United States of America
Stout Harry Ritter gave a sudden chortle of glee and looked up from the copy of the “Long Point Snort” he was languidly perusing in the shade of some cedars behind Tent Four.
“Say, fellows, have you seen this stuff about Bull Taggart?” he demanded joyously.
“How could we when you hog the paper the minute it comes out?” inquired Ted Hinckley sarcastically. He had sent in a poem the day before and for ten minutes or so had been waiting with ill-concealed impatience to see whether it had found favor with the editors. “Well, what is it?” he went on impatiently. “Why don’t you get it off your chest? What kind of bull has he been throwing now?”
“He’s been chased by a shark,” chuckled Ritter fatly. “Monster fifteen feet long pursued his boat for over a mile out in the Sound. Tried to upset him by bumping its nose against the keel. This is rich! Four rows of teeth sharp as razors.... Gleaming white belly—stomach would have been more refined, seems to me. Remember Dolly Wade, who called ’em blue- stomach crabs. Where was I? Um-um. Oh, yes. Monstrous dorsal fin cutting the water like a knife. Gee-whiz! Bull will kill me dead one of these days. I s’pose he’s training to be an author when he grows up. You can have it, Ted; I’m through.”
He tossed the sheet lazily to Hinckley and lounged indolently against the trunk of the cedar.
“Does he pretend he really saw it?” asked Steve Haddon, linking brown, muscular fingers about an equally brown knee; “or is it meant to be just—er—fiction?”
“Oh, he saw it, of course,” said Ritter with a giggle. “No fiction about that. Recognized it as a regular man-eater, too, by something or other about its expression, didn’t he, Ted?”
“Eh?” Hinckley started guiltily and hurriedly shifted his gloating eyes from the five-line verse which, even in crude mimeograph, thrilled him with the pride of authorship. “What’s that? Oh! Why, sure! It—its teeth, it was.”