“You ask Mr. Ellsworth about it and see what he says,” Ralph Warner said. “He’ll tell you it’s better for Skinny to wait till he can earn a little money and then buy a belt-axe. There’s time enough.” “Sure he would,” I said, because I know just how Mr. Ellsworth feels about things like that. And for all I know, maybe he didn’t want Skinny to have everything at the start, just so as he would be able to get some things all by himself later. Because Mr. Ellsworth thinks that’s the best way. Of course, we always jollied Pee-wee about his belt-axe and about wearing his scout-knife and his drinking cup hanging from his belt right home in Bridgeboro, as if he was in South Africa, and Mr. Ellsworth always said he was the typical scout—that’s the word he used—typical. But now I began to think maybe it would cause some trouble and I hoped he wouldn’t be giving Skinny any of that kind of talk. But he did just the same, and it made a lot of trouble. Pee-wee’s all right, but I don’t care if he knows what I said, because it’s true. On Monday we had it fixed for Skinny to come up to Camp Solitaire, and Westy and I would teach him some stuff out of the Handbook. Then we were going to give him the new stuff so he could put it on, because we wanted him to feel good—you know what I mean—when he went to meeting. We didn’t want him to feel different from the other fellows. But usually we don’t do that until a fellow takes the oath first. Oh, boy, but wasn’t he proud when we put the khaki suit on him, and fixed the hat on his head. He smiled in that funny way he had that always made me feel kind of bad, because it made his face look all thin. And he was awful bashful and scared, but anyway, he was proud, I could see that. So then I opened the Handbook to page 59, where there’s a picture of a scout standing straight, making the full salute, and I told him he should stand straight and try to look just like that. He said, “I ain’t fat enough,” but I told him not to mind, but just to look at that picture and he’d know how he looked as a boy scout. “How soon will I be one?” he said. And I told him pretty soon. Now I thought about that picture early in the morning and I made up my mind I would show it to him when he got dressed up. You can bet he didn’t look very much like it but a lot I cared about that, as long as it made him feel good. So early in the morning before he came, I took my two dollar bill (that’s my allowance my father always gives me Monday morning) and put it in the Handbook at page 59, so that I could find the place all right.