“Please don’t talk to me at all,” I said to Will. “As long as you’ll get chased home to-morrow morning what’s the use of scrapping? All you had to get was bird study and carpentry to be a Star Scout, and you know as well as I do that a Star Scout means a Star Patrol. You had to go and throw mud on the parade. Jiminies, nobody ever heard me shouting about the rules—I’ve broken some of them and I’ve bent a few others—but when you know blamed well that you can’t take a boat back at night without being nailed, jimmy Christmas, what’s the idea of doing that?”
Will said, “Oh I could have pulled it up in the bushes before I got to the float, couldn’t I?”
“Couldn’t you?” I shouted at him. “No you couldn’t you! Do you want to gather up some sticks or don’t you? It’s all the same to me.”
We all started picking up sticks for the fire and none of us spoke to each other—some merry party. Dub was kind of funny the way he went around picking up sticks not saying anything. I guess he was surprised because he never saw me like that before. Once, after we got the fire started, I saw how he winked and made a funny face at Will. A lot I cared, I was so good and mad. The more Dub saw how mad I was, the more he kept kidding me about it, winking at Will and acting—you know how. He said, “As long as you feel so much like roasting I wish we had some potatoes and we’d roast them.”
“Do you blame me?” I said. “You’re all alone up here, so you don’t have to be thinking about your patrol. But if you knew more about Temple Camp you’d know that a scout honor is a patrol honor. And a scout black eye is a patrol black eye—you ask any Scout up here.” Dub said, “As Pee-wee would say, it shows how much I don’t know. All I can say is that if Temple Camp wants to teach me anything it better be quick about it. It will have to do it by Saturday.”
“Temple Camp will take care of him first,” I said, looking at Will.
By that time the two of them were standing close to the fire, turning round and round so as to get dry. I kept putting sticks on it. I couldn’t help it, I had to smile at Dub, the funny way he kept turning around. He wouldn’t let on that he was trying to make me laugh. He said, “When I go home I can tell my mother I went around a lot up at Temple Camp.”
“Yes, and you didn’t have to go breaking the rules to do it,” I said.
“I didn’t see any good enough to break,” he said.
I said, “Well there’s one thing, I’m going to make a report to Slady[1] about what you did, about the rope and all, and I bet you won’t even have to take your life saving tests on the Eagle award—I bet the Gold Medal will cover that. You’ll have the hero medal and you’ll be an Eagle Scout both.”