“We wouldn’t stop there,” said the Carlisle boy; “we’d be so scared that we’d just take a running jump across the Atlantic Ocean and land in Europe.”
“What would you really do now if you met a bandit?” the stranger asked. “Shoot him dead I suppose, like Deadwood Dick in the dime novels.”
“We don’t read dime novels,” said Westy.
“But just the same,” said Warde, “it might be the worse for that bandit. Didn’t you read——”
The traveling man laughed outright.
“All right, you can laugh,” said Westy, a trifle annoyed.
The stranger stuck his feet up between Warde and Westy, who sat in the seat facing and put his arm on the farther shoulder of Eddie Carlisle who sat beside him. Then he worked his unlighted cigar across his mouth and tilted it at an angle which somehow seemed to bespeak a good-natured contempt of the boy scouts.
“Just between ourselves,” said he, “who takes care of the publicity stuff for the boy scouts anyway? Who puts all this stuff in the newspapers about boy scouts finding lost people and saving lives and putting out forest fires and plugging up holes in dams and saving towns from floods and all that sort of thing? I read about one kid who found a German wireless station during the war——”
“That was true,” snapped Warde, stung into some show of real anger by this flippant slander. “I suppose you don’t know that a scout out west in Illinois——”
“You mean out east in Illinois,” laughed the stranger. “You’re in the wild and woolly west and you don’t even know it. I suppose if you were dropped from the train right now you’d start west for Chicago.”