“Oh! I suppose I shouldn’t complain,” Andy Bowles continued, trying to smile away the discontented frown that had settled across his forehead. “Here, in this good old Long Island town of Hampton, there are lots of ways a pack of lively up-to-date Boy Scouts can have good times during vacation. With the big bay at our doors, and a bully little motorboat like this to go fishing or cruising in, there’s no reason for us not to be hustling most of our spare time.”
“Yes,” Rob Blake went on to add, wishing to soothe the ruffled spirit of his comrade, “and you know what glorious camping trips we can have with a lot of the boys, just as we used to in other summers. There is the full Eagle Patrol, except our fat chum, Tubby, who’s gone to see the sights of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and Merritt Crawford, who expects to be away for a month and more with his folks.”
“Besides,” continued Andy Bowles, as though the fact gave him more or less solid satisfaction, “all the other patrols are full—eight each in the Hawk, the Black Fox and the Badger, with a new one forming in the bargain. Boy Scout activities are at flood-tide around Hampton these days.”
“One reason for that, I take it,” mused the skipper of the little Tramp, “is the fact that through our activities in the past we have managed to keep our troop in the public eye, more or less. People know what the Eagles have done, and on the whole they favor their boys joining the newer patrols. There’s been a big change in the young fellows of Hampton, I’m told, since this Boy Scout movement first came to town.”
When the young leader of the Eagle Patrol made this modest assertion, he certainly hit the truth squarely on the head. During the last two years the members of the Eagle Patrol had made a name for themselves in Boy Scout annals—as the new reader will find out for himself if he cares to read the earlier books of this fascinating series.
Among other things they had, through a happy chance, become associated with certain scientific gentlemen connected with the United States Government, who were experimenting with a new and secret model for a big airship patterned somewhat after the famous Zeppelins of the Germans.
On another occasion they had been enabled to assist in saving the design of a wonderful submarine, also intended for the use of the Government, and the secret of which it appeared was coveted by emissaries of a nation supposed to be hostile to the United States, and desirous of learning all about such an important discovery that was apt to play an important part in future ocean warfare.
Some of the scouts later on were given a chance to pay a visit to the wonderful canal that was then being dug across the Isthmus—at Panama; and the record of how they made themselves exceedingly useful while down there will always be a bright page in the history of the Hampton Troop.
Mention has already been made by Andy Bowles, the bugler of the troop, of the trip to Mexico, with its attendant adventures; and also of the foreign tour undertaken by several of the Eagles on the previous summer, just when hostilities had broken out between the nations of Europe; and Belgium, where they were compelled to visit, was torn from end to end with the mad struggles of warring factions.
Yes, surely the Eagles could rest upon their laurels from this time on, and history would accord them the laurel wreath as the most enterprising patrol known to the Boy Scouts of America.