“Oh, cut it out,” said Connie disgustedly. “If you’re not a swimmer you’re not a swimmer, that’s all. You bluffed it as long as you could; thanks for telling us in time. Now go on inside and get your stuff and chase yourself away from here. Slade said you struck out once; now you struck out again. You’re some false alarm, I’ll say!”
For a moment Wilfred hesitated, but there was nothing he could say. He went into the cabin and got together his few things, undergarments and his old overcoat (he had no scout possessions) and packed the suit-case that Arden had contributed to the big enterprise of a summer in camp. On an end of this were painted the letters A. D. C. standing for Arden Delmere Cowell. As the twice discredited boy emerged with this, looking pitifully unlike a scout, Charlie O’Conner’s rather cumbersome wit was inspired to say, “Good initials—Abandon Duty Cowell.”
Wilfred paused and looked at him, angry and irresolute, then went on. What would the spirited, brown-eyed Arden have said if she could but have known that her initials had been used to manufacture another brutal nickname for her pal and brother?
CHAPTER XXV
NEW QUARTERS
His first thought was to go to the Archer farm, but he realized that he had no money to do that. And if he were going to keep his promise to old Pop Winters, he must not go home; indeed he had not the money to do that either, for his precious five dollars was pledged.
Other boys had been discredited at Temple Camp, but these had fallen foul of the management, not of the scout body. No guest at camp had ever presented such a pitiful picture as Wilfred, as he stood irresolute in the woods below the Bridgeboro cabins with nothing whatever about him to connect him with scouting. In the woods he looked singularly out of place in his plain suit, his suit-case in one hand and his overcoat over the opposite arm. Most boys departing from Temple Camp went away resplendent in scout regalia and howling out of the windows of the Catskill bus.
He went to the commissary shack where Tom Slade had lately been busy assorting and piling camp provisions and paraphernalia. In the semidarkness of this place he encountered Tom alone and told him all there was to tell.
“Why the suit-case?” Tom asked.
“I had to take my things away from there.”
For some reason or other, which no living mortal can explain, Wilfred had not told Tom nor any one else of his kindly plan in connection with Pop Winters. He was not ashamed of what he was going to do, but he seemed ashamed to tell of it.