“Now Tom,” said the Scoutmaster, “you and I are going to have a little pow-wow—you know what a pow-wow is? Well, then I’ll tell you. When the Indians get together to chin about important matters, they call it a pow-wow. They usually hold it sitting around a camp fire, and we’ll do that too when we get to Salmon River, for the Indians haven’t got anything on us. But we’ll have our first pow-wow right now walking along the street. What do you say?”
“Yer—yessir.”
“You heard the judge say you haven’t any relations and, in a way, he was right, but he was mistaken, too, for a scout is a brother to every other scout and you’ve got lots of brothers, thousands of them; or will have when you get to be a scout. And after you get to be a scout, why you’ll have a pretty big pack to carry. The question is, can you carry it?”
“Yessir.”
“You’ll have to carry the pack for all these brothers of yours. If you make a slip—tell a lie or throw a stone or interfere with Ching Wo—everybody’ll say it’s the Boy Scouts. Just the same as if Roy Blakeley should send a flash message wrong. The telegraph operator would give us the laugh and say the Scouts didn’t know what they were doing. You and I’d get the blame as well as Roy. So you see, Roy’s got a pretty big pack to carry, but he manages to stagger along with it.
“You may have noticed that the Scouts are great fellows for laughing. If there’s any laughing to be done, we’re going to be the ones to do it. We don’t let anybody else have the laugh. That’s our middle name—laughter.
“There’s one other little thing, and then I’ll tell you the main thing I want to say—flash it, as you fellows would say. We have to be careful about talking. Stick your tongue out a little way between your teeth and say them.”
“Them,” said Tom.
“The first thing for you to do is to make a list of all the words you use that begin with th and say them that way. You know we have troop calls and patrol calls and all sorts of calls, and we’ve got to be able to make them just right—see?”
“Sure-yessir.”