“How many merit badges have you got, anyway, Mr.—Slady?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Tom said; “about thirty or thirty-five, I guess.”
“You guess? I bet you’ve got the Gold Cross. Where is it?” Hervey made a quick inspection of Tom’s pongee shirt, but all he saw there was the front with buttons gone and the brown chest showing.
“I couldn’t pin it on there very well, could I?” Tom said, lured by his companion’s eagerness into a little show of amusement.
“Where is it?” Hervey demanded.
“I’m letting a girl wear it,” Tom said.
“Oh, what I know about you!” Hervey said, teasingly. “You can bet if I ever get the Gold Cross or the Eagle Badge (which I won’t this trip) no girl will ever wear them.”
“You can’t be so sure about that,” said Tom, out of his larger worldly experience, “sometimes they take them away from you.”
“You’re a funny fellow,” Hervey said, while his gaze still expressed his generous impulse of hero-worship. “I guess I seem like just a sort of kid to you with my twenty merits—twenty and two-thirds. Maybe some girl is wearing your Distinguished Service Cross, for all I know. But we fellows are crazy to have the Eagle award in our troop. I suppose of course you’re an Eagle Scout?”
“I guess that was about three or four years ago,” Tom said.