The elder Slade was a pathetic spectacle. He had gone down quite as fast as his son had gone up. He leered at the boy with red and heavy eyes out of a face which had not been shaved in many a day. His cheek bones protruded conspicuously. The coat which at the time of Mrs. Slade’s funeral had been black and which Tom remembered as a sort of grayish brown, was now the color of newly rusted iron. His shoe, which had turned traitor to him and whispered the direction of his flight to the trailing scout, was tied with a piece of cord. He was thin, even emaciated, and there was a little twitch in his eye which grotesquely counterfeited a wink, and which jarred Tom strangely. He did not know whether it was his lately-acquired habit of observation which made him notice this or whether it was a new warning from Mother Nature to his father. But Tom was not afraid of a man whose eye twitched like that. He stood as firm as Roy Blakeley had stood that night of his first meeting with him. That is what it means to be a scout for two months.
“Yer—a—a one o’ them soldier lads, hey, Tommy?” said his father unsteadily.
“You stay there,” said Tom. “Yer seen what I d-did ter de marshal. I’m stronger now than I wuz then, but I’m—I’m gon’er be loyal.”
“Yer one o’ them soldier fellers, hey?”
“I’m a scout of the Second Class,” said Tom with a tremor in his voice: “or I would be if ’twasn’t for you. I—I can’t tell ’em the trackin’ I done now. I gotter obey the law.”
“Yer wouldn’ squeal on yer father, would yer, Tommy?” said Slade, advancing with a suggestion of menace. “I wouldn’ want ter choke yer.”
Tom received this half-sneeringly, half-pityingly. He felt that he could have stuck out his finger and pushed his father over with it, so strong was he.
“Gimme the pin yer took,” he said. “I don’t care about nothin’ else-but gimme the pin yer took.”
“What pin?” grumbled Slade.
“You know what pin.”