“No, I’m afraid I don’t, Roy,” I confessed.
“It was the Scouts’ Gold Cross,” he said. “It means he risked his life to save a fellow when he was a scout. . . It was a little sick fellow that he saved.”
“His wearing it shows how he always remembered the Scouts, doesn’t it?” I observed weakly, for I hardly knew what to say.
“None of the people here really knew him,” he said, ignoring this remark.
“He was probably of a more retiring nature than you, Roy,” I said. But the pleasantry was lost upon him.
We strolled on up the hill in silence and stood for a moment chatting in front of his home, which is one of our show places here in Bridgeboro.
“Mr. Ellsworth found him down in Barrel Alley,” Roy said; “he was a hoodlum. After he got to be a scout he went ahead of us all. Even Mr. Temple had to admit it—and you know how kind of grouchy—as you might say—Mr. Temple is sometimes.”
I nodded, smiling.
In a general way, I did know the story of how John Temple had become interested in the Scouts through the reclamation by them of this hapless orphan, and before I left for France myself (which was on the following Friday), I learned more of the young hero’s history. I have since had reason to regret that I did not look more carefully at the several pictures of the boy which were displayed in Bridgeboro after the news of his death reached us. They were pictures of a Boy Scout, to be sure, and two years makes such a difference in a boy’s appearance that I dare say I would not have recognized the aviator from the stolid-faced, khaki-clad youngster whose photo our local paper reproduced with such vaunting pride.
It was Mr. Ellsworth, that untiring scoutmaster, who told me the story of Tom as far as he knew it. He said that as Tom had been the best all-around hoodlum in town, so he had become the best all-around scout; that it was attributable directly to Tom’s wonderful reformation that Mr. Temple had been drawn, neck and shoulders, as he said, into the scouting movement and had founded and endowed Temple Camp in the Catskills, which I believe has come to be regarded as one of the finest scout camps in the country.