“Oh! you’re stretching things again, Billy, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his finger at the other. “Arthur isn’t so anxious as all that to see anyone suffering. He only wants to know that everything is all right; just as your mother would go over the house again and again when expecting company. While we’re ready to take care of any emergency case that comes along, I’m sure all of us would be just as well satisfied if there didn’t happen a solitary accident while the Fair lasted.”
“That never occurred yet, as far as I know,” declared Billy; “and there have been some years when as many as a dozen people got hurt. One man last season had a nasty fall with a race horse on top of him, and they took him to the hospital with both legs broken. I could string off half a dozen cases that I plainly remember.”
The coming of a party of visitors, curious to see what the scouts were doing at the two tents, broke up the conversation. For quite some time all of them were busily engaged showing them facts connected with camp life; explaining how they made an excellent cooking fire by using stones for a foundation; proving that the ancient hunter’s way of baking a fowl by shutting it up over night in a hole in the ground previously made very hot was the original “fireless cooker,” and many other interesting things.
All the time each scout was doing everything he could to prove what a great benefit the organization to which he belonged had turned out to be for the boys of America. They made many converts among the men, and also a few among the women, who confessed that up to this time they had been laboring under a false conception as to what the scout movement stood for.
“I can plainly see,” said Arthur to the scout master, after some of these greatly interested people had passed on, shaking hands heartily with the boys as they thanked them for their courtesy, “that there’ll be another patrol of the Oakvale Troop between now and Christmas.”
“It begins to look as if we would set a few hundred people right about the meaning of scoutcraft and ambitions,” admitted Hugh; “and for that, if nothing more, I think this Fair camp is going to be one of the best advertisements we could ever have run across.”
“But while they seem to understand all about the other things we’ve shown them,” Arthur said, looking rather amused, “I can see that they take little stock in the usefulness of scouts in case of accidents. They always look at each other when I’m modestly telling what we hope to do for anyone that needs help, and the way they nod shows that they accept it with a grain of salt.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, also smiling, as if to show that it did not worry him, “I noticed the same. Now, I might have told those unbelievers a few things we’ve done, particularly about that field hospital last summer, and when we helped the Red Cross surgeon and nurses among the injured strikers; but I held my tongue. It would seem too much like blowing our own horn to please me.”
“One thing sure,” interrupted Ned Twyford, who had come up in time to hear the burden of their little conversation. “If they run across any of the Oakvale folks, and get to sneering at the idea of boys doing temporary surgical work, they’re going to hear a few plain facts that will make them sit up and take notice, believe me.”
Another batch of visitors, on their way to see the prize cattle of other fairs that were on exhibition in the sheds not far away, stopped to take a look around. Somehow the sight of those tents seemed to appeal to nearly every man; and he wanted to pick up a few pointers, if his knowledge concerning scout doings was hazy.