“I guess you’re pretty nearly right, Billy; but don’t think I’ve given up trying to influence him on that account. Opposition only makes the game more worth playing. Something seems to tell me that we’ll make Mr. Prentice see a great light one of these days.”
“That’s the ticket, Hugh! ‘Never give up the ship!’ is our motto. We’ll try and get up some scheme to prove to Addison’s dad that he’s barking up the wrong tree when he thinks the scouts are a shiftless lot, who’ve got a reputation that hasn’t any foundation in fact.”
The boys were some little distance outside of the town of Oakvale when they had this conversation with Mr. Prentice, who owned the big quarry toward which he was heading when stopped on the dusty road by the chums.
Oakvale was proud of its troop of Boy Scouts, and justly so. If you do not know why this should be, it may pay you to secure a few of the previous volumes in this series and read what some of those boys had done to gain such an enviable reputation among the thinking people of the neighborhood.
Even a glance over the titles of these books will show the extent of their activities in the time that had elapsed since the troop was first organized. As Hugh and his comrades went steadily on their way as the weeks and months crept by, they were constantly finding numerous opportunities to add to the esteem in which they were held by the community.
Well had they proved the vast advantages which scouts have over ordinary, unattached boys in a country town. Organization had done wonders for many of the members of the troop. There was really not a single family in Oakvale a member of which wore the khaki of the troop but stood ready to openly declare that a most radical change for the better had followed since “Tommy joined the scouts.”
Hugh had received the proper credentials from Headquarters to be an assistant scout master; and sometimes during the temporary absence of Lieutenant Denmead, a genial, retired army officer who had willingly assumed that office because of his love for boys, Hugh filled his place acceptably.
If Mr. Prentice had not been one of the most stubborn men alive, and if he had been open to conviction, he certainly would never have closed his ears to the stories that were told of the doings of these Oakvale scouts, and proven to be absolutely true.
Why, only on the preceding spring several of them chancing to visit Lawrence, a town many miles away, during the great freshet which culminated in a disastrous flood, had aroused the dormant local scout troop, almost dead from lack of appreciation, and performed prodigies in the way of saving distressed families caught in their homes by the rising waters.
Then Hugh, on that same visit, had actually saved the life of a reckless boy who ventured onto a bridge threatened by the flood, snatching him off after he had fallen and become senseless just before a floating tree carried the structure down amidst the boiling waters of the torrent.