“I’m only six minutes late,” I said; “Silver Foxes always show up.”
“Well, let us hope so,” Mr. Ellsworth said. And I kind of saw that something was wrong. “Westy isn’t here,” somebody shouted.
“He’ll be here in a minute,” I said; “get to work; you should worry about Westy.”
But just the same I felt sort of uncomfortable because one thing Mr. Ellsworth is a stickler about is us being on time. Whenever a scout comes late for campfire up at Temple Camp or at a troop meeting either, he always gets a look from T. E. At camp we have breakfast at 7:42 and lunch at 1:23 and supper at 7:13, just to teach the fellows to go by minutes.
Anyway, I started working with my patrol, who were painting the deck. I stuck right to it, but all the time I was wishing that Westy would show up. Every time I heard a sound I looked up. Because maybe you don’t know that a patrol leader is responsible for his patrol and if one of them falls down, it’s just the same as if he fell down. First the fellows kidded us about it, especially me, and spoke about the Tardy Foxes, and the Sleepy Foxes, but pretty soon Mr. Ellsworth came to me and said he guessed I’d better go into the club house and telephone to Westy and find out what was the matter.
“Find out if he’s awake yet,” somebody said.
“Maybe we’d better send a taxi for him,” another fellow shouted.
“You think you’re very funny, don’t you?” I said, “Maybe you raving Ravens won’t rave so much when you find out he’s sick in bed.”
So I went in and telephoned, and oh, jiminy, that was the first time in my life that I ever really wished a fellow was sick. But his mother told me he hadn’t been home since about half-past seven and that when he went out he had a catching-mit and a baseball with him.
Jiminies, I don’t often get scared, but I could feel my heart up in my mouth, kind of, and I didn’t know what to tell the fellows and Mr. Ellsworth. It was like a disgrace to my patrol and it disgraced me, too, you can bet. He would go off and play ball and let us fellows do all the work on the boat and then he’d go in it up to Temple Camp. Gee, that’s one thing a scout never is—mean. We had it all fixed up to work and then he flunked and let us do it all.