“I see you’ve got the card,” said Pee-wee.
“Yes,” said Westy, pulling on his blouse. “We’re going to frame it and send it to National Headquarters, too, for an exhibition of scout stealth and silence.”
“I suppose you think we walked in and took it,” said Roy, adjusting his belt. “We didn’t. We never entered your tent. A scout is honorable.”
“No,” said Pee-wee, “you took the tent down and put it up wrong end to. A scout is observant. Are we going fishing to-day?”
[Chapter XII]
“Up Against It for Fair”
When the telegraph and the telephone and the speeding autos and the bullying of the hapless village constable failed to reveal any clue to the burglar at Five Oaks, John Temple proceeded to pooh-pooh the whole business and say that there had never been any burglar, but that in all probability the maid had been exploring Mary’s trinkets just as Mrs. Temple returned and that the “frightful-looking man” whom she had met on the stairs was a myth.
It was then that the maid, groping for any straw in her extremity, said that a boy in khaki had darted out from the pantry and across the private rear lawn into the woods beyond while she stood at the window.
If she had stuck to the plain truth and not permitted Mr. Temple to beat her down as to the man she actually did see on the stairs, a great deal of suffering might have been saved. But the loss of only one trinket, and that one of small intrinsic value, seemed to lend color to the theory that it was the work of a boy rather than of a professional adult burglar, and the master of Five Oaks, thinking this matter worth inquiring into, called up the constable and laid the thing before him in this new light.
Mr. John Temple had no particular grudge against the Boy Scouts. He was a rational, hard-headed business man, decisive and practical and without much imagination. His lack of imagination was, indeed, his main trouble. He was not silly enough and he was extremely too busy to bear any active malice toward an organization having to do with boys, and except when the scouts were mentioned to him he never gave them a thought one way or the other. He was not the archenemy of the movement (as some of the boys themselves thought): he simply had no use for it.