“Of course, you can, Tom,” said Roy, almost frightened at his emotion. “You can have an invisible badge, Tom—I know you can, Tom.”
He did not know exactly what Tom had meant; like many of his expressions, it had been a puzzle to them all, but he would have said almost anything now to soothe him and help to efface those black memories.
“Sure you can, Tom,” he repeated. “That’s easy—old man. It’s a cinch!”
CHAPTER XVI
THE INVISIBLE BADGE
“What the dickens does he mean by an invisible badge, do you suppose?” Westy Martin asked.
“You can go through my pockets,” said Roy. “Tomasso is the Boy Scout puzzle. They ought to give him away with a years subscription to Boys’ Life. I wish that hadn’t happened, though. Jiminy, who’d have thought that kid would go up in the air like that!”
Tom had not been long in regaining his stolid composure; he appeared to entertain no grudge against Raymond, and even offered to bait his hook for him, for the little fellow angled continually, notwithstanding that he never caught anything. But his offer was indignantly refused, and Raymond would have nothing to do with him.
The Honor Scout cruised leisurely up the river, held at anchor for the scouts to swim now and then, and making shore at safe places when the tide was full, for luncheon or supper on the wooded banks with the precipitous mountains rising sheer above them.
Harry Stanton was hardly recognizable now as the panic-stricken, scatter-brained youth whom they had found on the mountain. Under Mr. Ellsworth’s eagle eye he had a chance to show his skill at swimming, but his wish to be ever in the water was discouraged and for the most part he contented himself with reading the Handbook and studying the second-class tests. Already he had “backfired” which was the word they used for the act of qualifying for a merit badge before one reached the stage where the scout rules would permit him to receive such a badge.
This was in music. He had played a mandolin in former days and now he had one of those Hawaiian instruments—a Ukulele—and he would sit on the cabin locker by the hour picking out the soft South Sea airs, to the delight of the whole troop.