I said, “What’s the name of your patrol?”
“Well,” he said, “we call ourselves the Church Mice, because we’re so poor. First we were going to call ourselves the Job’s Turkeys, but we decided that a church mouse was poorer than Job’s turkey.”
I had to laugh. I said, “I’ve heard of most every kind of an animal’s name used for patrols, but never a church mouse. My patrol is the Silver Fox.”
“That’s a bully name,” he said.
“Anyway,” I told him, “the name hasn’t got so much to do with it. There was a patrol up at Temple Camp named the Pollywogs and they were all nice fellows. But they couldn’t keep still, they were always wriggling. Maybe they’re frogs by this time, hey? A fellow up there told me about a patrol named the Caterpillars and afterwards they changed it to the Butterflies. He said there’s a patrol out west named the Mock Turtles. There’s a lot of crazy fellows come to Temple Camp. One of them said there was a fellow in his troop named Welsh and he was chosen leader of a new patrol and they wanted to call it the Welsh Rabbits. Church Mice is all right, I think.”
He said, “It’s appropriate anyway. I’d like to see a camp like that Temple Camp; it must be great. Trouble with us is we’ve had such plaguey hard luck. I guess there’s only one thing harder than our luck and that’s the biscuits we make.”
I said, “I can make hard ones.”
Then he said, “You see, first our scoutmaster had to go to war. We were just starting then. It hit us a good whack. We tried to get another, but scoutmasters were pretty scarce; they were scarcer than coal and sugar. They were all in France. So I took the job. I suppose we could get one now, but since we’ve worried along all this time without one, we decided to wait till our scoutmaster gets back. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I understand, and we want to give him a welcome. We’ve got two dollars and fourteen cents toward it so far—two dollars and four cents, really, because there’s a Canadian dime. If there are any Canadian dimes around, we’re sure to get them. Then our little shanty burned down. It was about the best camp-fire I ever saw, only it left us without a meeting-place. We still have our scout smiles; they don’t cost anything. If they did, we couldn’t afford them.”
I said, “That’s one thing about scout smiles; they’re the only things that haven’t gone up.”
“So here we are,” he said, “hiking back home after one of our fool enterprises. We intended to go down on the train, but we went to the circus instead.”