Somewhat chagrined to think that he was not the best choice for patrol leader, Art made a resolution: he’d be leader some day. At the meeting that night he was pleased that he was the first boy named for the head of the new patrol but he declined and nominated Connie and told why he did.
Connie had no opportunity to refuse. His election went through with a hurrah. Before the meeting adjourned every boy, under Connie’s blushing direction, had filled out his application blank. The midnight train carried these and a request for a charter for the Wolf Patrol of Scottsville, Alexander Conyers, Patrol Leader, with a membership of thirteen boys.
So much store was set on the uniforms, especially the hats and khaki shirts—brown was the color selected—that the boys all went to Mr. Trevor’s office the next morning to be measured and this order followed the other papers at once. With no manual of drill or rules to guide them, there was now little to do but discuss the future and the alluring possibilities of scouting, maneuvers and camping in the open.
After a day or two of this Art came back to his big dream, the possibility that they might some day own an airship. He even romanced over what he described as the “Aviation Squad” of the Wolf Patrol. When he had company he would discuss details of aeroplane building and while alone he was often making sketches and figures. In this he could not hold his chums’ complete attention, for the Boy Scout idea was too strong this week to admit another interest.
An event was impending in Scottsville that made the juvenile citizens irresponsible. On Saturday the “Great Western Triple Circus, Menagerie and Congress of World’s Wonders” was to give two performances. Even the new Boy Scout frenzy lessened as Saturday approached. And there was little wonder, for among the alluring “wonders” promised was this feature: “Master Willie Bonner, positively the youngest aviator in the world, will make two death-defying, cloud-piercing aeroplane flights each day. At one o’clock and six o’clock he will give free exhibitions, ascending heavenward until lost to the eye and then returning earthward in a series of spirals and glides never before attempted by man.”
When a circus comes to town (that is, to a town that has no pretensions to being a city) every boy under sixteen becomes indifferent to the ordinary duties of life.
Prearrangement was hardly necessary, but it was well understood Friday night among Art’s friends that all would be on hand in the morning “to see ’em put up the tents.” When Art awoke it was not dawn. As he lingered, half dozing, a sudden sound fell upon his ear.
Through the silent night came a noise that no town boy ever fails to recognize—the low, heavy, guttural rumble of a circus van. It is like the sound of no other vehicle in the world. City boys do not know it. To the town boy it is like a galvanic shock. His pulses throb with a wild eager anticipation, while his heart sinks for fear that he will be too late—that is, that he will miss seeing something that some earlier-arrived boy has glimpsed in the dark.
Art threw on his clothes and stole out of the house. It was a half mile to the “commons” where the tents were to be set. He started on a dead run, buttoning his clothes as he went. There were no tents erected as yet, but the deep-voiced, gray-shirted boss was busy with his long steel tape. And where he sank his foot in the dewy grass, dejected, unshaven men were throwing down the worn pale-blue stakes. Then work began. Stake drivers, four on a team, with heavy sledges revolving one after the other like the spokes of a wheel, drove the heavy piles in jumps into the ground.
Canvas wagons had been backed up in various places and their teams of four and six horses, heavy harnessed and resplendent in bits of red leather and polished metal, were off across the town, heavy of hoof and jangling their traces, to bring other wagons from the train. At last as day broke, animal cages, the “lions’ den” and the “ticket wagon” appeared—the latter a blaze of golden figures and bearing the ornate portraits of the wonderful men who had conceived and owned the “Congress of Wonders.”