“Was that thunder?” Mr. Talbot asked. “All right, just wait here a second.”
As Wyne waited, the rumbling of distant thunder could be heard in the sky. He held out his hand, but felt no drop of rain. Presently a flash of zigzag lightning lit the sky and one of the blinds of the Talbot house blew shut, then open again. Soon he was hurrying home to South Farrelton with the Temple Camp booklet stuffed in his pocket and was scarcely indoors when the storm which had been threatening broke in full fury. Wyne’s parents and sister had retired, but his mother called to him to know if he had got wet, and asked him to go up and shut the attic window for the rain seemed to be blowing from the north.
Wyne paused in the dark attic for a few moments, listening to the torrential downpour on the shingles and looking out of the window which was streaming with rain. He wondered where indeed Hervey Willetts could be so late at night. Why did his thoughts dwell on Hervey Willetts? There were fine, brave scouts in his own troop. He went downstairs to his own room, stirred by the heroic fury of the maddened elements and, as he entered, a deafening peal of thunder smote his ears. It seemed to shake the house in its tumultuous frenzy. That was the climax of the storm.
It was odd how two things strangely related to each other occurred immediately upon the waning of that spasmodic storm. And how each of those things was characteristic of the boy concerned in it. At about the same time that Wyne Corson propped himself comfortably up in bed for a leisurely perusal of the beautifully illustrated Temple Camp booklet, Hervey Willetts scrambled up a broken rafter of the old barn roof which had been struck by lightning and had fallen into his dank and streaming dungeon.
Oh, he was lucky! Just as he always said he was, he was lucky. But he did not know of his greatest luck. He did not know that a boy down in South Farrelton was sitting propped up in bed looking at the pictures of lake and cabin and reading about the rules and awards and all the pleasurable routine of a great scout community in the sequestered woodland of the Catskills.
Wet, hungry and exhausted, with a stern military school staring him in the face, Hervey Willetts was luckier than he knew. Reading, looking at books even, was something that he never did. He had never even seen that familiar booklet about Temple Camp! Yet that little booklet was destined to influence his future. It is funny, when you come to think of it, how that pretty, tasseled prospectus was to deal this doer of mighty deeds a knockout blow. He had blithely disregarded every by-law and rule that it contained. He had repudiated it in toto. And now, out of its own prosy printed matter, it was to strike him back with a fine retaliatory swat.
CHAPTER XXXIV
SUMMER PLANS
Mr. Talbot had spoken correctly; Hervey went to Chestnut Hill Military Academy. Also Hervey had spoken correctly; he escaped. He was sent back and remained till the Christmas holidays. It is not pleasant watching a caged squirrel and we shall not follow his troubled career when he marched in line and saluted and went “in formation” to Chestnut Hill village twice a week, once to church and once to the movies.
Under the influence of Mrs. Walton and the Christmas spirit, Mr. Walton allowed Hervey to return to school in Farrelton after the holidays and Chestnut Hill saw him no more. But he remembered it and walked a fairly straight and narrow path till early summer. Only once did he fall from grace and that was when he hiked to Centervale in quest of a retired sailor who was said to be an expert at tattooing. He did not find the artist, but he got a ride in an airplane to Commonwealth landing field (twenty miles out of his way) and had to sleep in a shed that night.
As summer approached, Hervey’s home presented unmistakable signs of the tremendous enterprise of his old-fashioned, home-keeping step-parents—the long projected trip to Europe. For the first time, Mr. Walton would entrust his book and stationery store to a competent young assistant, Snoopy Seeley as Hervey called him, because he conscientiously saw to it that the girls attended to their work. There were no late dances in Walton’s Book and Stationery Store after the advent of Snoopy Seeley. But for all this young man’s horrible dependability, poor Mr. and Mrs. Walton contemplated their vacation with the true home-keeper’s dread and anxiety.