“That’s what I like to hear,” responded Dick, heartily. “We’ll consider that settled, then. And another thing, Harry, why on earth don’t you join the Boy Scouts? You’d have no end of fun, and we’d all be glad to have you.”
“Dick, all you fellers are bricks fur askin’ me, but how can I? There ain’t anything I want as much as to be a Scout, but I have no chance to do what you fellers do. I got to work here from the first streak of daylight, and quit when my work’s done, which is about ten o’clock every night of the week. I am what you call a ‘kin and can’t’ worker; I work as soon as I can see and quit when it is so dark I can’t see.”
Here the boy tried to laugh, but the laugh sounded strained somehow. It is very possible that he felt more like crying than laughing, but he would not have had Dick know it for anything.
Dick, however, knew boy nature pretty well, and he guessed from Harry’s tone just about how he actually felt. So he joined in the latter’s laugh, and then said, “Now you see here, Harry, old top, if you really want to be a Boy Scout, there’s nothing on earth can stop you, and we’re going to help you all we know how. I was speaking to Mr. Durland about you the other day or, rather, he was speaking to me, and he said that he knew of a place that is open in Mr. Scott’s saw-mill that he was sure he could get for you. That would give you more money than you are making now, I guess, and you’ll have a whole lot more time to yourself. What do you say; would you like to have that job?”
Harry’s eyes had filled in spite of himself while Dick was talking, and now he said in a queer, husky voice, “Say, Dick, would a duck swim? All I can say is that you Scouts and your Scout-Master are about the squarest, whitest bunch that I ever run up against! I’ll beat it right along with you when you go back, and this job can go to the dickens for all I care!”
“Hold on a bit,” exclaimed Dick, smiling at the boy’s impulsiveness. “You can do us a whole lot more good by sticking right here than you could by being with us just now. We need you here to tell us in case Flannigan doesn’t get back on time.”
“Gee, I’d clean forgotten all about that,” said Harry, ruefully. “But you’re dead right, and no mistake! I’d be willing to stay here the next ten years if it would help to catch them guys. They’re pretty slick articles, though, don’t fool yourself about that,” he added.
“Oh, I realize that we will have our work cut out for us,” responded Dick, seriously, “but I think we can get them finally, just the same.”
“You bet your sweet life we can!” responded Harry, enthusiastically. He had great confidence in his new friends and felt that if anybody could, they would be the ones to break up the plot. But he was better acquainted with the rascals than any of the Scouts, and knew that they were resourceful and desperate men.
He was immensely proud of the trust placed in him by Dick and the others, and resolved then and there to show himself worthy of it. He had always had a hard time of it, and had never known what it meant to have a father or a mother. He had earned his own living as long as he could remember and that in a great city meant constant and hard work. Then he had drifted north in search of better paying work, and had finally landed the job of cookee to the lumber camp. There was more money in this than he had ever made, although it was little enough, in all conscience, but the work was terribly hard and exacting.