“Oh, that isn’t such a queer thing,” Hugh assured him. “I’ve had it happen to me more than once. It always bothers me, and I get no peace till I’ve figured it out. I’ve even lain awake a night going over the alphabet from A to Z, and then failing to get it. In the morning the name would come to my mind just as easy as falling off a log.”
“Well, that may be the way with me,” said Walter. “I stood and watched that boy move around, and half a dozen times it seemed as though it must be on the tip of my tongue to say his name, yet I slipped connections. A little thing like that makes me mad. I tell you I’ll find out just who he is, if in the end I have to go up and ask him.”
“Perhaps, if you pointed him out to me, I might help you,” suggested Hugh, knowing how set in his way Walter could be.
“I could do that all right, Hugh,” replied the other scout. “Come to think of it he’s acting as if he mightn’t be engaged in the nicest kind of business going.”
“How about that?” demanded Hugh.
“Why,” came the reply, “from what I saw it struck me he must be connected with one of those fakirs who are trying to skin the simple country people of their dollars.”
Hugh arched his eyebrows, remembering what Billy had told him.
“Do you remember whether the man he was working with was a fake doctor who has a medicine he calls the Wonderful New Life Remedy at a dollar a bottle, worth ten to any one? Is he a man with a black pointed beard, and eyes that glitter like you’ve seen a badger’s or a snake’s do?”
Walter uttered an exclamation of wonderment.
“Why, I declare, Hugh, you’ve hit the right fakir to a dot,” he told the scout master. “Perhaps you’ve even noticed that boy?”