Pretty soon I made up my mind to do something that I didn't want to do. I went up the hill to where the Ohio troop bunked. They had one of the big troop cabins that holds two patrols. I guess they were a pretty fine troop, because they had everything fixed up dandy. One patrol was called the Royal Bengal Tigers, and the other was called the African Tigers, and both patrols wore yellow scarfs with black stripes, and all their scout staffs had tigers' heads on them. Even when they dived from the spring-board they had a certain kind of a way of jumping, they called it the tiger spring, and nobody could get the hang of it. Some organization they had, that's what Mr. Ellsworth said. Every one of those fellows had a tiger claw hung around his neck. Oh, boy, that was some troop for you. I asked one of the fellows for Bert Winton, and he came around from behind the cabin where he was spearing papers and leaves. I said, "_You_ fellows ought to be called the gold dust twins, your two patrols I mean, because you're so plaguy particular--picking up leaves and everything. You'll be dusting the roof next." He said, "We're a lot of old maids up here." Then he climbed up on the cabin roof and sat on the peak and I scrambled up too, and sat down alongside of him. Honest, that fellow would squat in the funniest places. And always he had a stick with him. "Nice and breezy up here," he said, in that quiet, easy sort of way he had, "and we can scan the horizon. Anything particular?" I don't know, but I seemed to sort of feel that he knew what I was going to talk about, and I guess he just scrambled up there so the other fellows wouldn't hear. Cracky, that fellow always had his wits about him, that's one sure thing. I said, "I don't deny that I was kind of sore at you when you spoke to me down at the lake, and I can't tell whether I like you or not, because I can never make out what you really think. You've got to know what a fellow thinks before you know whether you like him or not, don't you?" He said you sure did, and then he said, "Well, I know whether I like _you_ or not, so it's all right." "I don't care much whether you like _me_" I said, "it's Skinny I'm thinking about. I know I like _him_, you can bet." "And that's one reason I like you," he said; "because you like _him_. Ever notice how the cedar shingles shrink in a dry spell?" I said I didn't know they were cedar. "You can always tell cedar by the smell," he said, "and the S warp." Gee, I didn't even know what an S warp was. Then I said right out--I said, "You told me that you tracked Skinny. Would you mind telling me where he went?" For a minute he just kept moving the stick around and then he said, "What would be the use of telling you?" "Because I've got a reason and I want to know," I said. Then all of a sudden I knew why he climbed up there. It was partly so he could see all around and be sure no one was coming. "Well, why do you want to know?" he said.