“All right then, I’m not going to have anybody thinking I have. I’m not sick any more than you are—or any of them. And I don’t want you to tell them either. Do you think I want all those—those outdoor scouts thinking I’m weak?”
Again there blazed in Wilfred’s brown eyes that light which had given Lorrie Madden his sober second thought; the same light bespeaking pride and high spirit which Tom had seen in the eyes of Arden Cowell while she was championing her stricken brother. It was a something—pride if you will—that shone through the boy’s diffidence like the sun through a thin cloud.
“If you tell them, I won’t stay there,” he said, shaking his head so that his lock of wavy hair fell over his forehead and he brushed it up again with a fine defiance.
“All righto,” said Tom.
“Remember!”
“Yes, but you remember to keep your promise to your mother and the doctor,” Tom warned. “Because you know, Billy, I’m sort of responsible.”
“I’ll keep my promise as long as you don’t tell,” said the boy in a kind of spirited impulse. “But don’t you tell them I’m—I’ve—got heart failure—don’t you tell them that and I’ll keep my promise. Do you promise—do you?”
“I think I can keep a promise as well as you can,” Tom laughed, a little uneasy to observe this odd phase of his young friend’s character. He hardly knew how to take Wilfred. It occurred to him that the boy was going to have a pretty hard time of it with this odd mixture of sensitiveness and high spirit. He was afraid that his new recruit, so charmingly delicate and elusive in nature, was going to bunk his pride in one place while trying to save it in another. But all he said was, “All right, Billy, you’re the doctor.”
CHAPTER VI
THE LONE FIGURE
Wilfred Cowell saw Temple Camp for the first time as no other boy had ever seen it, for he went there not as a scout, but to become a scout. It was not only new but strange to him. He saw it first as the Ford emerged out of the woods road which ran from the highway to the clearing. No car but a Ford (which is the boy scout among cars) ever approached the remote camp site. And there about him were the buildings—cabins and rustic pavilions and tents for the overflow. If the invincible little flivver had rolled twenty feet more it would have taken an evening dip in the lake.