“That’s the way it keeps on going,” remarked Hugh with a shrug of his shoulders. “You see, we have quite an Italian population now, and somehow those people never seem to know the first thing about keeping things tidy. Perhaps they’ve had no one to show them. I sometimes think that the scouts will have to get busy and see what they can do about it.”
“Say, that’s a great scheme, Hugh!” exclaimed Billy, sitting up suddenly as if he had received a shock from a battery. “We’ve done a good many things that called for praise from the citizens of our home city; perhaps we might be able to set this thing working. Take the matter up, seriously, won’t you, Hugh? Propose something along that line to the boys at the meeting to-night. As sure as you live, I believe they’d jump at it like wildfire. And say, maybe the women folks would back us up if we started in to clean the town. Do you really think it could be done, Hugh?”
“If we had a fair show, I believe we could manage it,” replied the other thoughtfully; “but it’s sure to set people talking. I know a gang of boys who’d make all manner of fun to see the scouts acting as scavengers, picking up paper, asking people not to throw things around, and trying to start a ‘clean-up week’ here like they have in lots of places.”
“Hugh, when you speak of boys acting that way, I guess you don’t mean any scouts, do you,—Alec Sands, for instance, who used to oppose nearly everything you started?” Billy questioned.
“Oh! Alec is a good friend of mine these days,” replied the other; “and I hardly believe we’ll ever go back to the old conditions again. I was thinking of the one boy in town who seems to scorn the scouts and say all sorts of mean things about us,—Lige Corbley, you know.”
“Oh! you’re right about him! He is the worst boy in town this summer,” said Billy, shaking his head. “I never can understand that fellow. He’s as smart as they make ’em, only he has a bitter tongue in his head, as if he was born with a grouch against everybody that tries to be decent. Yet I’ve seen him carrying that little crippled brother of his across the muddy street, and say, it couldn’t have been done more tenderly if it had been you! Yet he’d as soon fight as eat his supper. And so you kind of think Lige would give us a heap of trouble, do you, if ever we started to clean up the town?”
“Well,” Hugh replied, “he has a few boys about as bad as himself trailing after him in a sort of gang, and I expect they’d try all they could to upset our work for us. But if we have the women of the place and public sentiment back of us, we might be able to make a decent showing. I’d want to consider our chances well before making a start. Scouts don’t like to be looked down on as failures. Once they put their shoulders to the wheel, they want to see things move.”
“If only we had a mayor with any sort of backbone, things could never be done like that clodhopper of a farmer dumping his waste tomatoes out of the tail of his wagon along the road! Well, I should say not! I sometimes wonder if it would make any sort of change if the women did get a vote here and we had a woman for mayor!”
At that mental picture, Hugh laughed loud and long.
“Honest, I’d like to see the day that happens,” he remarked seriously. “Things couldn’t be any worse, and chances are they’d improve a thousand per cent. Men get so shiftless. Any old thing does for them, rather than have a lot of trouble. They think they get enough of that during spring cleaning or moving time.”