“I must tell a little yarn first. The day before yesterday Marcoo and I were in Boston. We lunched at a fine restaurant. At a table near us was a gentleman—he looked like a Mexican or Spaniard—who couldn’t speak any English and addressed the waiter by signs. There was a boy with him, a classy-looking fellow of about fourteen, his son, I guess. ‘I’ll wager that boy is a scout!’ I whispered to Marcoo. ‘His eyes take in everything, without seeming to stare about him much—and see the way he carries himself—straight as a string!’”
“So I suggested that we should try the scout salute on him as we passed out,” struck in Marcoo. “We did! And fellows, he was on his feet like a flash, holding up his right hand, thumb resting on the little finger-nail, and the other three fingers upright, saluting back! We guessed then that he was a Mexican boy scout, traveling with his father.”
“He seemed jolly glad to see us,” Nixon again took up the anecdote; “just beamed! But he didn’t apparently understand a word of English except ‘Good-day!’ not even when we passed the scout motto to him as a watchword: ‘Be Prepared!’ We might all three have been mutes saluting each other.
“We talked it over, coming home, Marcoo and I,” went on the patrol leader. “And we arrived at the conclusion that it would be a great thing if our hearty motto, as Captain Andy calls it, could be taught to boy scouts all over the world, in some common form understood by all, as well as in their mother tongue. So that when scout meets scout of another country he could pass it on as a kind of bond and inspiration—together with the Scout Sign which is understood in almost every land to-day.”
“So we looked it up in Esperanto—the only attempt at a world-language of which we know, and in which my father is interested.” Marcoo leaped to his feet, too, as he excitedly spoke. “And it sounded fine! Give it to them, Nix!”
“Estu preta!”
“Estu preta! Estu preta! Be Prepared!” One and all these present-day scouts took it up, shouting it to the seven fires, and to the wind which caught it from their lips like a silver feather to bear it away beyond the hollow, as if it would girdle the world with that hearty motto, in some universal form, as Nixon had suggested.
“Estu preta!” it was still on their tongues when, camp-fires extinguished, they marched home. They flung it at each other in joyous challenge as they said good-night.