"Yes. Would you?" What had brought the leader back was the look of heartrending yearning in the gray eyes of a tattered little boy. He smiled, seeing that look swiftly change to one of joy, of awe.
"A scout!" repeated Johnnie. Suddenly beside him there was standing a figure that was strange to Second Avenue. The figure was that of a sunburned, lanky individual wearing a hunting shirt of forest-green, fringed with faded yellow, and a summer cap of skins which had been shorn of their fur. Under the smock-frock were leggings laced at the sides, and gartered above the knees. On his feet were moccasins. There was a knife in his girdle, and in his hands a long rifle. This was one of Johnnie's new friends, that slayer of bad Indians, that crack shot, the brave scout of The Last of the Mohicans. "And y' say I can be one? One just like Hawkeye?"
"Hawkeye?"—the young man was puzzled.
Johnnie was disappointed. "Oh, y' don't know him," he said. "But he's a scout."
"I mean a boy scout," explained the other, kindly. "Like my troop there"—with a jerk of the head toward the khaki-clad column, now halted a block away on the edge of the sidewalk.
Now that radiant, sunlit look—the glowing eyes and the flashing teeth adding to the shine of hair and brows and lashes. "Boy scout!" cried Johnnie. Hawkeye was gone. Another vision stood in his place. It was Johnnie himself, gloriously transformed. "Oh, gee! Oh, my goodness! Oh, Mister! Oh, could I? I'm crazy to! Crazy!"
The usual crowd of the curious—boys mostly—was now pressing about the leader and Johnnie, the two or three grown people in it peeping over the heads of the younger ones. But the young man seemed not to mind; and as for Johnnie, if honors were coming his way on the open street, what could be better than to have a few onlookers?
"Of course you'll be one," declared the leader, heartily. He produced a pencil and a businesslike notebook. There was a pair of glasses hanging against his coat on a round, black cord. These he adjusted. "Name and address?" he asked; "—then I'll drop in to see you, and we'll talk it all over with your father."
Johnnie gave the information. "Only I ain't got a father," he corrected, as the pencil traveled. "But y' can tell the boy scouts, if y' want t', that I got a cowboy friend named One-Eye, and he lives in a garden that's down in a terrible big cellar, and wears fur all up his pants in front, and a bigger hat'n yours, and spurs. And I got five books—Aladdin, and The Mohicans, and Treasure Island, and King Arthur and Crusoe!"
The crowd listened, ready to laugh if the young man did, which was what the young man did not. On the contrary, what Johnnie had said seemed to have wrought the considerable effect Johnnie had desired. For the young man opened his eyes so big at Johnnie that the glasses fell off, and hit a button of his tunic with a clear ring. "You—you read?" he inquired.
