Finally, when Dick explained the reason why the boys wanted him to come to their next meeting:
“Sure!” he exclaimed warmly, “I wouldn’t miss it, Dick! I’ll explain it to your mother, too, and she wouldn’t have me miss it, either! It means a lot to me to see you and these other lads catching on—while you are still boys—to ideas which it has taken me a lifetime to reach, through all kinds of experience, and some of it pretty tough, too. You tell the other boys that I’ll be there, and that their motto means just as much to me as it does to them.”
At the time of the meeting the following Sunday, Dick had brought over a chair for Mr. Gray to sit in while the four boys took their accustomed places, and he assured them that he would be quite ready to adopt their charter as a rule of life. Then, lowering his voice, and at the same time talking more earnestly, he said:
“Dick has told me, boys, of some of your difficulties and victories during this cruise, and your desire to carry on the same warfare against evil, now that you have come ashore again. I believe that there is more of the man in every one of you than there was when you first started on this cruise.”
“Would you like us to read the Charter, sir, before we begin?” asked Tom. “Because it’s about that especially that we want you to tell us. Say, Bill, you ask him what you want to know. But we’ll hear the Charter first.”
So Dick read the Charter through and ended with the words: “and so Captain Craven gave up his life to do his duty as a good scout, and to keep his oath and law; and so, to remind them of his brave and courteous act, the officers of the navy have the custom of saying: ‘After you, Pilot’, when one of them steps back to make way for another; and also, because we want to be reminded of his brave and courteous act and faithfulness to his oath and law, we—the members of the Four Square Club of Duck Island—have written out this story to read once in a while, and have taken ‘After you, Pilot’, as our motto.”
After a little pause, Mr. Gray said: “What was it, Bill, that you wanted especially to know?”
Bill felt a little shy, but he was already beginning to control his feelings more, and so pushed through the shyness and began to talk.
“At the last meeting, sir, Dick was saying that there ought to be something else in the Charter about how it was that Captain Craven was strong enough to do the way he did. And the old Admiral, when he first told the story to George Gray, he said that it was because Captain Craven was in the habit of doing his duty every day of his life—no matter what it was. What do you think of that, sir?”