"Oh! wake me up, somebody, when he gets really started," groaned Giraffe; "of all the slow-pokes, Step Hen takes the cake."
"I'll tell you," began the other, with a sly look toward the speaker, as though he purposely delayed his disclosure in order to annoy the impatient Giraffe; "you see, it was this way, fellows. I happened to be walking out along the back road just after we'd done breakfast. Thought I'd dropped my handkerchief somewhere, but afterwards I found it inside my hat, you know."
"Sure, it's always that way," muttered Giraffe, who lay with his eyes closed, but drinking in all that was said.
"Well," continued Step Hen, "all at once I noticed something that interested me a whole lot. There was one of them queer little tumble-bugs you always see ashovin' round balls along the road, an' goin' somewhere that nobody ever yet found out. This critter was tryin' like all possessed to push his ball up a steep little place in the road. Sometimes he'd get her close to the top, and then lose his grip; when it'd roll all the way back again.
"Say, boys, that insect's pluck interested me a heap, now, I'm tellin' you. Right there I got one of the best lessons a scout ever picked up in all his life; which was the old story, 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' And he kept on tryin' again and again. I must a stayed there all of half an hour, just watchin' that game little critter pushin' his ball up against the hardest luck ever. And then, when I just couldn't stand it any longer I took bug and ball in my hand, and put 'em both up on top of that rise. And after that I thought I had a right to turn my badge right-side up!"
The scouts looked at each other. Somehow, they did not laugh, though surely it must have been one of the queerest reasons ever advanced by a fellow-scout, as an excuse for wearing his badge honorably.
Despite its grotesque nature, there was also something rather pathetic about the thought of Step Hen, only a careless, half-grown lad at best, spending a whole lot of time, simply watching an humble but game little beetle trying to fight against hard luck, and almost as interested in the outcome as the wretched bug itself.
"How about that, Mr. Scoutmaster; is Step entitled to wear his badge that way, on account of helping that silly little bug climb his mountain?" asked Davy, turning to Thad; but though his words might seem to indicate a touch of scorn, there was certainly nothing of the sort in his manner.
Thad himself had been amused, and deeply interested, in Step Hen's recital. Only too well did he know what a careless and indifferent fellow the boy had ordinarily been classed, both at school and at home. Seldom, if ever, had he paid the least attention to things that were happening all around him, and which might appeal to the sympathies of boys who were made of finer grain than Step Hen.
And now, it seemed that something had been making an insidious change inside the scout; when he could feel such intense interest in so trivial a thing as the pluck of an obscure tumble-bug. Time was when Step Hen would have cared little whether or not he came down with his heel upon such an object, which ought to know better than get in his path.