“I’d like to see them stop you.”
That Hervey Willetts was a kind of odd number at camp was evidenced by his unfamiliarity with the things that were very familiar to most boys there. He was too restless to hang around the pavilion or sprawl under the trees or idle about with the others in and near Council Shack. He never read the bulletin board posted outside, and the inside was a place of so little interest to him that he had not even seen the beautiful canoe that was exhibited there, and on which so many longing eyes had feasted.
Now as he and Skinny entered that sanctum of the powers that were, he saw it for the first time. It was a beautiful canoe with a gold stripe around it and gunwales of solid mahogany. It lay on two sawhorses. Within it, arranged in tempting style, lay two shiny paddles, a caned back rest, and a handsome leather cushion. Upon it was a little typewritten sign which read:
This canoe to be given to the first scout this season to win the Eagle award.
“That’s rubbing it in,” said Hervey to himself. “That’s two things, a bicycle and a canoe I’ve lost before I got them.”
He sat down at the table in the public part of the office while Skinny, all excitement, stood by and watched him eagerly. He pulled a sheet of the camp stationery toward him and wrote upon it in his free, sprawling, reckless hand.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
This will prove that Alfred McCord of Bridgeboro troop tracked some kind of an animal for more than a half a mile, because I saw him doing it and I saw the tracks and I came back with him and I know all about it and it was one good stunt I’ll tell the world. So if that’s all he’s got to do to be a second-class scout, he’s got the badge already, and if anybody wants to know anything about it they can ask me.