"I—I know what it means, all right," he muttered; "it means he's dead."
After supper he parted his wavy blond hair, and his mother brushed his uniform while he stood straight as an arrow, his handsome head thrown back. Then his father proudly helped him into his big military coat and he started for East Bridgeboro, which was across the river. The new Y. M. C. A. hall was not over there, but he was going there first, just the same.
"Have you got the print?" his mother called after him.
"Sure."
"The one holding the gun? You look so soldierly and brave in that!"
He laughed as he went down the steps.
But presently he became moody and preoccupied again. "If Mr. Ellsworth hadn't dragged me into this thing," he said to himself, "it wouldn't be so bad. It gets my goat to stand up there and shoot off about honor and all that sort of thing. But I can't do anything else now. I'm not going to spoil it all. It can't make any difference to Tom now—he's out of the game. He's through with the scouts, and he's through with Bridgeboro—dead, I'm afraid. And if I just keep my mouth shut, it'll be doing just what he wanted me to do; it was his idea."
So that was settled; and in place of those troubling thoughts, Roy Blakeley bobbed up in his mind—Roy Blakeley, who believed in "standing by a fellow through thick and thin"; who was staunch and loyal to his friend.
"He's a bully kid," mused Roscoe, as he crossed the bridge whence the town derived its name, and the more he thought about Roy the more mean and contemptible he felt himself to be.
At the scouts' float hard by the bridge, the troop's cabin launch, the Good Turn, participant in many adventures, past and to come, lay moored.