Tom Slade at Temple Camp

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

The old Indian scout sign, which is the title of this chapter, means There is nothing new along this trail and it brings you back to the same place. If you are already acquainted with Tom Slade and his friends you will be safe in skipping this chapter but, otherwise, you would better read it for it will tell you a little of Tom's past history and of the other scouts with whom you are to become acquainted in this volume.

To know just how all this election business came about we must go back a year or so to a time when Tom Slade was just a hoodlum down in Barrel Alley and believed with all his heart that the best use a barrel stave could be put to was to throw it into the Chinese laundry. He had heard of the Boy Scouts and he called them "regiment guys" and had a sophisticated contempt for them.

Then all of a sudden, along had come Roy Blakeley, who had shown him that he was just wasting good barrel staves; that you could make a first-class Indian bow out of a barrel stave. Roy had also told him that you can't smoke cigarettes if you expect to aim straight. That was an end of the barrel as a missile and that was an end of Turkish Blend Mixture—or whatever you call it. There wasn't any talk or preaching—just a couple of good knockout blows.

Tom had held that of all the joys in the mischievous hoodlum program none was so complete as that of throwing chunks of coal through streetcar windows at the passengers inside. Then along had come Westy Martin and shown him how you could mark patrol signs on rocks with chunks of coal—signs which should guide the watchful scout through the trackless wilderness. Exit coal as a missile.

In short, Tom Slade awoke to the realization not only that he was a hoodlum, but that he was out of date with his vulgar slang and bungling, unskilful tricks.

Tom and his father had lived in two rooms in one of John Temple's tenements down in Barrel Alley and John Temple and his wife and daughter lived in a couple of dozen rooms, a few lawns, porches, sun-parlors and things up in Grantley Square. And John Temple stood a better chance of being struck by lightning than of collecting the rent from Bill Slade.

John Temple was very rich and very grouchy. He owned the Bridgeboro National Bank; he owned all the vacant lots with their hospitable "Keep Out" signs, and he had a controlling interest in pretty nearly everything else in town—except his own temper.

Poor, lazy Bill Slade and his misguided son might have gone on living in John Temple's tenement rent free until it fell in a heap, for though Mr. Temple blustered he was not bad at heart; but on an evil day Tom had thrown a rock at Bridgeboro's distinguished citizen. It was a random, unscientific shot but, as luck would have it, it knocked John Temple's new golf cap off into the rich mud of Barrel Alley.