"Artie has got a list of the things we need, and they add up to four dollars and twenty-two cents. If each fellow chips in a quarter, we'll have enough. Each fellow that wants to go has to pay his own railroad fare—Alf is going with me, so he should worry.
"I don't suppose that Marshall Slade will condescend and we should worry. If we're going up to camp on the first of August, we'll have to begin getting our stuff together—the sooner the quicker—keep still, I'm not through. We were all saying how numbers look funny on scout cabins—five, six, seven. It reminds you too much of school. Uncle Jeb said it would be a good idea for us to paint the pictures of our patrol animals on the doors and scratch off the numbers, because the way it is now, the cabins all look as if they had automobile licenses, and he said Daniel Boone would drop dead if he saw anything like that—Cabin B 26. Good night!"
"Daniel Boone is already dead!" shouted Peewee.
"Take a demerit and stay after school," Roy continued. "So I vote that we buy some paint and see if we can't paint the heads of our three patrol animals on the three cabins. Then we'll feel more like scouts and not so much like convicts. If we do that, it will be thirty cents each instead of twenty-five."
Before Roy was through speaking, a scout hat was going around and the goodly jingle of coins within it, testified to the troops' enthusiasm for what he had been saying. Tom dropped in three quarters, but no one noticed that. He seemed abstracted and unusually nervous. The hat was not passed to little Alfred McCord. Perhaps that was because he was mascot....
TOM'S HAND CLUNG TO THE BACK OF THE BENCH.
Tom Slade at Black Lake—Page 44