When these two troops reached camp they found the tall scout Archer waiting for them. How much he knew or suspected it would be difficult to surmise.
"Uncle Jeb told me I might show you up to the hill," he said. "Some of you fellows came from Ohio, I understand. You're all to bunk up on the hill."
"I guess that's a mistake," Roy said.
"No, I think Uncle Jeb has things down about pat," Archer said in his easy off-hand manner. "The old man's pretty busy himself and so he told me to be your guide, philosopher and friend, as old somebody-or-other said."
The two troops followed as he led the way, the Bridgeboro boys glancing fondly at the familiar sights all about them.
"There's where we'll put up our tent," one of them said, pointing at the area which was already crowded with the canvas domiciles. The place did not look so attractive as Roy and his companions had tried to picture it in their mind's eyes. They had never envied the scouts who had been compelled to make their camp homes there. It seemed so much like a military encampment, so close and stuffy and temporary, and unlike the free and remote abode that they were used to. They all of them tried not to think of it in this way, and Roy was in no mood to cherish any resentment against Tom now.
"It's near the cooking shack anyway, that's one good thing," Peewee observed.
"Listen to the human famine," Connie Bennett said. "Peewee ought to be ashamed to look Hoover in the face."
Roy said nothing. There was one he would be ashamed to look in the face anyway.
When they reached the hill, he was the first to pause in amazement.