"Can we play Indian, Mr. Norton?" asked Benny.
"We certainly can. I think everybody likes to get out into the woods and be an Indian once a year. You boys have something to do first, however. I want every one of you to be able to show a First Class Scout badge."
"We can do most of the stunts now," I told him, "only we haven't been seven miles and back."
The book says that before becoming a First Class Scout a boy must go on foot to a point seven miles away and return again, and afterward to write a short account of the trip. It says, too, that it would be better to go one day and come back the next, and that means to camp out all night.
That last was a hard thing to do because our mothers did not want us to go off that way alone. Mothers always seem to think a boy is going to get hurt or something. Mr. Norton finally talked them into it, all except Benny's mother. She wouldn't stand for it. Benny cried, he felt so badly about it.
"Do it in one day, then," Mr. Norton told him. "Remember that the law says for you to obey your parents without question. That is more important than to do the stunt."
CHAPTER VI
A FOURTEEN-MILE HIKE