"Perhaps you do," jeered Davy Jones, who could take hard knocks without any whimper; "but mother's darling boy ain't home right now. A true scout must learn to sleep in his blanket alone. An old boot will do for a pillow; and he won't ever want to be rocked to sleep either. The breeze will be his lullaby, and the blue canopy of heaven his coverlet."
"Hurrah for you, Davy; that's as good a definition of what a Boy Scout should accustom himself to, as I ever heard. I didn't know you had it in you to talk like that," said Thad, warmly.
"Oh! I got that out of a book," declared Davy, frankly.
"And Thad, do I have to give up these nice clean sheets; and crawl in between the folds of a nasty, rough, tickly blanket?" asked Smithy, pleadingly.
"It will be just as well for you to begin right, Number Five," said the scout-master, pleasantly but firmly. "Sooner or later, if you stick by the Silver Fox Patrol, you've got to learn how to rough it. And if you think enough of your fellow scouts to make this sacrifice, all the better."
Without a word then, Smithy tossed the offending sheets across to Thad; and followed with his usual night apparel.
"I'll take those pajamas, Davy; and thank you kindly for offering to loan them to me;" he said, bravely; but when the faded and somewhat torn night suit was immediately handed over to him, the particular boy was seen to shudder, as though they gave him a cold chill.
Still, he proved to be true grit, and was soon donning them, so as to keep up with the balance of the boys. Thad winked toward Allan, as much as to say that he felt very much encouraged at the progress being made in the education of Edmund Maurice Travers Smith, the spoiled darling of a weak mamma.
"Mark my word for it," he said in a low tone to his second in command; "with all his pink and white complexion, and girlish ways, there's the making of a good scout in Smithy. Given a little time for him to get over the cruel shock these rough ways bring to his orderly system, and you'll see a different sort of fellow spring up. The seed's there all right. And mamma's baby boy will turn into as sturdy and hardy a scout as there is in the troop."
Allan smiled, and nodded. Perhaps he did not have quite as much faith as the young scout-master, because he may not have been as good a reader of character; but he realized that what Smithy had just done was as valiant a thing for one of his nature as attacking a wildcat would be for another boy, built along different lines. For he was defying what had threatened to become a part of his own being, and with gritting teeth trying to show himself a real flesh and blood boy for once.